Forgotten Friday #39 - 湾音ゐちこ / Wawon Wichiko

So, 湾 means "gulf" or "bay". That's cool and all, but why did her creator spring for adding a "w" to the official pronunciation to turn Waon into Wawon? I'm getting this directly from the Nico Nico Pedia. Anyway, who knows. 

Forgotten Friday #39 - 湾音ゐちこ / Wawon Wichiko

Good news and bad news. Bad news? Only one of Wichiko's banks is available for download. Her creator, who I can only find identified as 湾/WAN, has posted three of them to the "stickied" post on their blog. (They set the date to 2019 so that it would always be the first post. That messes with my head - 2019 being the distant future, after which you will never post on your blog again.) Two of them are 404'd.

The good news only applies to me. I only have to test one bank!

Regardless of that, I feel like I stanned Wichiko at some point, but part of me isn't sure if that was a different UTAU entirely. I never used her on my YouTube channel, but I have a feeling I didn't use a lot of the UTAUs I stanned on my YouTube channel. The only video I have that shows up when I search "Momo" (as in Momone Momo) is this. (Warning, it's not worth watching.) The name feels familiar, but the design throws me off a bit. Regardless, let's go.

Who is Wichiko Wawon?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

Wichiko's readme is mostly about the rules regarding using her and not biographical data. All of the biographic information on her NicoPedia page you can figure out just by looking at her design. I think that's all I can say, really. Jisho actually links to Wikipedia for quite a few of its entries. You can look at real life examples of Wichiko's outfit if you go to the Japanese Wikipedia page for it. 

How is her bank?

The vowels be borked. Thankfully, this is a VCV bank. The issue is with the VV vowels, whereas the -V vowels are just fine. The issue is this almost glottal stop the voice provider did that comes out as a weird little bark in UTAU. Those weird transitions can be replaced with some creative OTOing of the -V samples. (OTO them the way you'd OTO it in a CV bank, basically.) Not all VV are borked, mind you. "i お" plays just fine. If you know how to fix those borks, then this is a really nice bank that can be used to make some beautiful music. It's not as good as I was remembering (because I was probably remembering a different UTAU), but it's still really nice.

If I had to give one criticism, I would say that if you're looking for it, you can hear where the noise was removed in Audacity in a few spots, but you wouldn't notice at all if you literally weren't trying to find it. But ya'll know I love the noisy, muffled banks.

Where can I download Wawon Wichiko?

You can download Wichiko from her distribution post. As stated before, only the first bank on the post (the most recent) is available for download. While I do like her voice, I think her design is her main selling point. As you can see in these videos, her design is really, really pretty. I would love to see more people drawing Wichiko.