Wiki Wednesday #68 - ねとの冬雪 / Neto's Huyuki

Something I didn't realize when I binge downloaded the Wiki Wednesday UTAUs with the intent of getting to them... eventually... is that Wiki Wednesday UTAUs kind of... will get new banks. So, if I download a bank and wait a year, there's likely going to be a new bank, meaning I have to wait until the internet is unmetered to download the missing ones. So, I need to be more prompt in tackling what I download. Which is why I'm going to go nyoom nyoom as nyoom as I can.

Wiki Wednesday #68 - ねとの冬雪 / Neto's Huyuki

Alright. So, I'll just point out that translating Huyuki's download page that has his bio on it with Google Translate gives really, really confusing results.

On the note of the name - Huyuki feels really wrong, and I was tempted to change it for the article, but the distributor does actually use Huyuki as the romanization. Another note about the title is just that I included the distributor's name instead of just the name itself. I do that for banks with names that could be repeated. Random example that doesn't exist, but someone probably thought, "Wow! I'll name my UTAU Fuyu and use 冬 as the kanji!" Someone else may say "The perfect name for my UTAU is Fuyu! I'll use 不由 as the kanji!"

Those are different names, but Blogger deletes all of the kanji from the URL. So, Fuyu and Fuyu's URLs would be pretty much identical except for the Wiki Wednesday ## part. But, you know, it's not just about not having articles have the same URL. It's also just to help make sense of similar names. I don't know a single other UTAU named Huyuki, but the lack of the surname makes it seem like there definitely could be. 

Who is Huyuki?

Official Artwork Packaged with Bank

Huyuki loves Winter and hates Summer. He doesn't like heat stroke and... I think he touches people's  hair without permission? He's seventeen and he hates kimchi. (My browser says kimchi isn't a word and that's not cool.)

But I am really confused in general. No one explains what is in the case. A really long guitar? An electric piano? A snow board? Skis? I mean, it's definitely some kind of winter sport as he's wearing goggles... But no one explains that!

I don't really have much to say, which may be an issue because there are only two banks to test, and I have a minimum word count to feel like I'm not cheating y'all out of an article by being lazy. I mean, if people really only care about the picture and the sound file, I could definitely just make articles with only fifty words that are technically just lists. But, I mean... That's not me. I make a lot of words.

How is Huyuki's voice bank?

Huyuki has two voicebanks: a three pitch CV and a one pitch VCV. Here's the deal with CV vs VCV: a great CV bank with a well tuned UST can sound better than an average VCV bank with an okay tuned UST. So, there's not an easy way to predict which bank will have better results, especially with the CV being three pitches instead of one. Adding pitches, though, can destroy a bank by making the voice kind of... jarring at transitions.

So, I don't know which will be better. 

Up first, we'll take a look at the CV. So, as you know, UTAU has changed somewhere at some point (or this is an issue with the shareware version) so that the prefix map will not work unless the suffixes are in the aliases. 

But like... I don't know how I never figured it out, but it takes like five seconds to fix in SetParam.

tools > change alias

I did need to edit the prefix map to get all of the pitches into one sample without just randomly moving things around. 

The OTOs are bad and the voice has some issues with noise. But, none of this matters, because the low pitch especially makes this a jiisan voice. This is a really weird sales pitch, but have you ever wanted to pair your young UTAU with a jiisan UTAU because their voices sound really good together? Too bad! A relationship between a middle aged man and a teenage girl is gross! But, Huyuki here? He's cool and seventeen years old. 

It's not just the pitch and the kind of voice, it's also the level of noise that almost every jiisan UTAU has for some reason. So, yeah, this is the bank for you if you want to pair your UTAU with a jiisan without, you know, promoting illegal stuff. 

Next is the VCV. The OTOs aren't really good, but they're completely tolerable, unlike the CV bank. The CV did have hints of a younger voice that made it stray away from jiisan territory, this one is very much a jiisan bank. And, like, you know that makes me prefer it because I'm weird like that. So with the question, which is better: the CV or VCV... The one that sounds more like a jiisan is better. I don't care which that is.

Where can I download Huyuki?

Download him from his download page! Now, I should clear something up. The voice itself sounds a lot like Hibiki Shinji, who is definitely not a jiisan voice. What makes it a jiisan voice is the level of noise in the samples. The microphones aren't completely terrible in jiisan UTAUs, but they're never perfectly clear. An UTAU with a jiisan design but a perfect recording environment is less of a jiisan UTAU than one who is supposedly seventeen but does have that noisy environment. And, like, we need that in the UTAU world, jiisan banks that are teenagers. It's a really nice voice type, dang it!