Forgotten Friday #207 - 紅子 / Beniko

 So, you'd think the reason that I'd be trying so hard to get all of these articles written would be because I will need to focus on my writing in November... But it's actually I just want to download more banks, but I can't do that until I get all the banks I already have out of the way!

Forgotten Friday #207 - 紅子 / Beniko

This UTAU has an insanely pretty design. Beniko is a young woman that dyes her hair who is around high school age. She loves strawberry jam, but soda isn't her cup of tea. And oh my goodness, did I mention the art? The painting style looks perfect!

Who is Beniko?

Official art from bank

(begin campaign)

There was a lurching feeling as she opened her eyes. She slowly adjusted to the dim, cool light as she looked around. She couldn't make sense of the grey rocky walls so she looked down at the floor. It was the same rocks, but she noticed her feet. She was wearing red high top Chuck Taylors. She had never owned any red high top Chuck Taylors. She looked back up and saw four other people just as dizzy and confused as she was.

She paused as she saw how ridiculous they looked. She looked up at the ceiling before noticing tapestries. It started to click as her gaze fell and landed on a throne. There sat a woman who was clearly meant to be a queen.

She was in… a castle? She tried to remember the last thing that had happened to her. To the best of her memory, she had been browsing Reddit in her bed before falling asleep in the middle of a Malicious Compliance story. She had been wearing pajamas, and now she was wearing blue jeans. 

The queen let out a booming laugh. She began to speak in an accent that sounded like a parody of medieval royalty. "Thou have been brought before us as only thou can save the empire! Nay…" The queen paused dramatically as she pulled the back of her hand to her forehead. "The world."

The woman in red shoes looked back at the other people. They were mostly in awe except for a girl with nearly grey skin and gunmetal hair. She signed in ASL "isn't thou singular?" The woman held back a laugh as she looked to the queen again. 

A booming voice came from the back of the group. The voice sounded like a bad parody of Vikings. Everyone looked back at him. He was stocky. He looked to be the average height of an American woman, but he seemed as wide as he was tall. "You are not of my Motherland. Why should we lay siege in your name?"

The girl signed again, "That's the question? Of anything, that?"

"I concur."

The woman slowly realized that everyone was a parody of something. The problem was that she hated fantasy as a genre. The second man looked like he belonged in a Tolkien movie, but was dressed as a samurai. He looked as if he was seven foot tall and so thin that she wondered how he hadn't snapped in half from gravity.

"Gee Wilkers, guys!" The girl who had been signing snapped her head back to look at the young man. He was dressed like Peter Pan, but had archery equipment slung over his shoulder. "This sure sounds nifty! We were so dang special, we got called to a place we don't even know to protect everyone!"

The girl who had been signing had noticed the woman reacting. She turned to her and signed, "His body and his voice came from different movies."

The woman bent at the waist and laughed. The room chilled as she realized that the men and the queen were staring at her. She cleared her throat before asking, "And what exactly do you want us to do?"

How are Beniko's banks?

Beniko has two banks: CV and Red CVVC. The CV bank has a red color scheme, but the Red bank has a grey color scheme.

Let's start with the CV bank! It is two pitches, with one of them being C5. I am extra glad I learned how to shift pitch by an octave in Praat. (It's eight. A full octave is 8 semitones according to Praat. I get it, but I also don't.)

Small funny aside - I fixed the OTOs of the plosives as there wasn't enough silence. When there's not enough silence before the plosive, the Hataori scripts stretch the consonants in ways they shouldn't. I did all of that and rendered, and the original OTOs were there. For some reason, all of the OTO settings had been saved in note properties. Cleared that, rendered, and much better!

The voice doesn't match the design in some ways. The voice is amazing and fills a niche of banks that can sound amazing above C5, but the design looks brooding and mature, whereas the voice is just so freaking cute without any obvious sense of it being voice acted. It is cute! Designs don't need to be one to one matches with voices, and plenty of people don't have voices that match their designs - I was just taken off guard!

Next, we have the two pitch Red CVVC. The OTOs are fine except for the OTOs for the vowels are borked and there's no VV. However, I realized I could just use the crossfade tool. The voice is very nice and clearer than her CV, but I battled to get the envelopes on the vowels to stop flipping out on me! I really do like the voice, but a Japanese CVVC without VV makes it harder to enjoy using it for me. If you prefer to not have VV, though, this bank is pretty close to perfect!

Where can I download Beniko?

If you're okay with CV or CVVC and need an UTAU that can comfortably hit C5, then yes. Download this. The links are on her official site. She is so nice!