Wiki Wednesday #119 - ねりか / Zestea's Nerika
This UTAU was the tenth UTAU added to my spreadsheet for this series! However, for the longest while it was the second one from the first in terms of who needed to be written about and my words failed me there.Number five was an UTAU named Dianne, but her page was removed. That means the number one, been neglected the longest UTAU was Nerika. She was there for so long because I contacted the voice provider. Zestea basically promised the moon, and I wanted to give Zestea a chance to get everything up before I wrote about Nerika. Sadly, that Moon never came and Nerika was not updated further.
That sounds weird when you slip into the mindset of Forgotten Friday (of course the person who made a bank in 2010 didn't respond!), but I started Wiki Wednesday in early 2019 if I remember correctly, and Nerika was released in early 2018.
There's nothing wrong with looking at what you promised and realizing you just literally can't.
If you asked me to record a six pitch vcv bank, I would laugh in your face. No. Unless you were paying me in vegan ice cream and sushi and were sitting beside me to stop me from wandering off… no. And I specialized MEL to take fifteen minutes of recordings if you dawdle, but no English list did that until then. Old English lists were worse than vcv, and Zestea promised to do that six times for one append. If a friend told me they were going to do all that, I'd tell them no because they'd hate the UTAU, their microphone, and making sounds period really quickly.
And don't even get me started on OTOs. I'm experienced and that experience makes me faster than other people. But six pitches of vcv? I only do that for money or objects I would have spent the money on directly. I will do free OTOs for six different friends no problem. But that's six happy people versus one. (The happiness I bring others makes me happy, but not enough to do six pitches of vcv without actual currency.) And don't get me started on the point when you just kind of don't want to talk because you can't stand your own voice after hours and hours.
Don't force yourself to keep promises like that. They were doomed to be impossible. The issue is really the way that the fandom criminalizes having fun. If you don't have a full VCV with blah blah blah and seventeen blah blah blah and a thousand dollar microphone, you can just kick sand. It's just one segment that is like that, but we all want to be popular cool kids at some point. And the popular cool kids won't look at someone with a cv bank.
So yeah. Life, huh?
Who is Nerika?
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| Official Art from Wiki |
Zestea is an amazing artist, and Nerika has an amazing design. If Zestea didn't feel pressure to promise more than was possible, I think Nerika would be one of the big names overseas.
But, it looks like one of her banks has sixteen pitches over four appends. I take roughly half an hour to record a vcv if I rush. Maybe the banks are cv! I won't know until I'm on pc! But if they are vcv, that would be eight hours of recording for me. Eight hours?! And I have over a decade of experience recording. Someone who is newer would take longer. I would just like… never even listen to Japanese music again if that was on my plate and I powered through it.
Nerika is an Android. It's thought that she's extremely faulty, though. She is blind in one eye and a big dummy. She's shy and has trouble interacting with people. She loves cute animals and tidiness, but can't stand rude people or delicate things that her faulty Android hands could break.
She has an Android design and a human design. Both are absolutely perfect. I mean, I love them both. I just really, really love the design.
I usually say more than I just love the design, but I don't know how to describe them to do them justice.
How are Nerika's banks?
All her Japanese banks have the same folder name. So when I extracted them, they all got barfed into the same folder. One of them came with an MMD model! I didn't test it, but I looked at it in PMXEditor, and it was pretty!
So, I deleted the super mega everything in it Japanese bank, and I'm extracting them all to their separate archive.
She has three Japanese banks, and one Arpasing bank.
1.0 is a simple, one pitch VCV bank. That's nice!
The OTOs are horrifically mangled to the point that I would need to open SetParam to fix it. So, I'm not fixing it. Her voice is adorably soft and sweet! But the OTOs are so bad, it makes me sad.
Her next Japanese bank is 1.1. It has four pitches, ranging from A3 to C5. I edited the prefix map to make all of the pitches play in the sample. OTOs still mangled, and I'm having to wait around while FRQs render.
It sounds really good, but C5 does feel a little forced and awkward compared to the super sweet and adorable rest of the bank. It's a good bank overall!
Next is 1.2, which has three banks, each with four pitches. Except for Virus, which is a joke bank I assume. I rendered a sample with Virus, but I kind of felt like I'd be a jerk if I posted it. It's that bad.
The bank is almost one gigabyte, and it's hanging when I tried to load it. I deleted Virus (heh, such a fitting thing to remove), and it loaded with no issue.
I don't understand how the suffixes were decided, however. Overdrive is C and Stasis is W. Y'all know I love a good American R, but I wasn't actually expecting it to be there. OTOs are still mangled and awful.
This sample has Normal, Overdrive, then Stasis in that order. Normal is like the other banks, though I think the quality is better. It's nice. Overdrive is a good bank if you like mature, yelly voices. The voice is a departure from the other voices. And this is why Stasis is "W". It's a whisper voice, and I absolutely love it.
Now... The Arpasing voicebank. I do not like Arpasing, but it's better than CZ style anything, I guess. It looks to be four pitches.
I hate this I hate this I hate this. I can't stand Arpasing. I don't know what samples she has, because there's seventeen thousand lines.
Okay, hissyfit over. It wasn't too hard to flip over, because it's all basically the same outside of the vowels being annoying. Being Arpabet means that Wikipedia has a page with what each vowel is. If it was CZ's method, I would have just yelled that naw, not happening. Because I edited the UST to be arpabet, I have an arpabet tester UST now. So yay!
Moresampler OTOs aren't that bad when it comes to CVVC. Moresampler does not understand the concept of VCV, but I don't feel like I need to edit these. It would be time consuming, and it's okay the way it is.
I love her and she is lovely. Do you hear how sweet and understandable she is?! Completely lovable. I would have to convert her bank if I wanted to keep her around, but... 444 megabytes is too big to live on my computer.
Where can I download Nerika?
You can find her download page on her official Tumblr. This is a cautionary tale about not biting off more than you can chew. Nerika has everything you need to make beautiful covers. But, well, she's likely never getting another update.
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