Wiki Wednesday #148 - 月夜鏡 / Tsukuyo Kagami

 Happy New Year!!! The current date is December 22, 2020. But... This will be published in the year Twenty-Twenty-Two!! Luckily, this looks like a really great UTAU to start the year off with! There is definitely a chance that I made a mistake in scheduling and you're reading this in 2021 as opposed to 2022, but at this moment, yay!

Wiki Wednesday #148 - 月夜鏡 / Tsukuyo Kagami

Tsukuyo Kagami. That's the name. On his page, there's no space in the reading of the name. But, it's just fandom rules to have a first name and a last name. So, instead of one word, it's two. Now, mind you, if I were writing for the wiki, I'd make it one word just to make sure the meaning wasn't ruined. But this isn't the wiki. This is a blog! I'm not calling myself the expert on UTAUs! Just a reporter. I'll probably do my normal alternating pattern for the name order. I don't know if Kagami has a wiki page, actually. I found him on the utao site itself.

Who is Kagami Tsukuyo?

Official Art from Bank

I started this article and then wandered off for a bit, but I'm actually really excited. I'm only ten articles away from hitting fifty thousand words! That's a lot!

And… I accidentally wandered off for a day or two. See why I'm so glad to not be stuck sitting down and doing everything at once?!

So, Kagami isn't deity inside is the mirror, but the mirror itself. The mirror is almost five feet tall and is around eighty-eight pounds. That is roughly a BMI of seventeen. While that is concerningly low, that doesn't actually explain if the deity has a BMI of seventeen or if it's just a really heavy mirror. That's way too much for a mirror to weigh, though. Also, I don't know how someone can simultaneously look twelve years old and three years old.

Kagami is stuck in the mirror, right? How does he like persimmons and hate eggplant?! Do people just toss it into a magical portal and then he throws back the core?

Or is it the thing where he's entirely invisible until he enters a mirror? He loses his memories at some point or another!

I am grateful to utao, though. They include voice samples on the page. As a Westerner, I read his design as female. It's traditional Japanese clothes, and if you have absolutely no understanding of the world outside of white bread America, it looks like a dress. The pastel colors are also really pretty. But naw. If you know stuff about traditional Asian clothes, you'll easily figure out that is a dude wearing dude clothes. (Okay, that would actually be cowboy clothes, but I liked how the line scanned.)

The voice is obviously male. If you scroll down, you'll see that the gender is "more or less a guy". So, I didn't need to Nancy Drew it by listening to the samples. But it was a bit of scrolling when my Western brain instantly jumped to how the pretty lady was wearing a pretty dress. 

I should clarify what I mean when I say obviously male. A girl can voice act a guy utau and it sound obviously male because she is putting on the affect of making a boy voice. Same with a boy doing a girl voice. He makes an effort to make it sound like girl. This is actually easier to do in Japanese just because they have more strict ideas of what it is to be male and female. At the higher pitches, I could see an argument that the voice is actually a bit androgynous, but I think that's just a side effect of singing higher than you're comfy with. C5 is a struggle to reach for most people.

How are Tsukuyo Kagami's banks?

Kagami has three banks, and they are all four pitches. He has CV, Moon VCV, and CVVC.

Multipitch banks are always the worst to make samples for because you have to smush all of the samples in a short amount of time. Let's start with CV.

The C5 pitch of the CV bank shouldn't be there. It doesn't fit very well, and the quality is low compared to the other pitches. The tone is a bit inconsistent even outside of that. I think it would take omitting pitches or using them specifically as "powerful" notes to get the best results from this bank.

Next, we'll cover his Moon VCV. (Technically, by the meaning of the kanji, black rabbit?) The OTOs aren't great, but they're good enough for me to just leave them alone!

All of the inconsistent tone stuff from before is seemingly gone now! The pitches do feel consistent, and they all sound good. This is a really, really good bank. The only problem I could even think of is just that the design doesn't exactly fit the voice in the sense that this doesn't sound like an eternal deity and more like a kid. But that's just a handwave away with "yeah, what do you think someone who never physiologically hit the age of thirty would sound like?"

Finally, we have CVVC! I absolutely love it. The high register and lower register are just so good that I don't care if they even blend that well, because they're both really good! I love this bank and it is perfect.

Where can I download Kagami Tsukuyo?

You can download him from his distribution page. I hope this article sets the tone for the rest of this year... Because this UTAU is perfect and you should download him and love him!!!