Forgotten Friday #319 - 茨音石榴 / Zakuro Ibarane

 it's not fair to compare these and the utaus I used for the 2025 Wiki Wednesday articles. I was basically searching the wikidot using the term "+cv -vcv" to show me utaus that didn't even have a VCV bank to save time! I can't search the visual archive like that though...

Forgotten Friday #319 - 茨音石榴 / Zakuro Ibarane

Yeah... I am not great at researching when I'm like this. I could look harder maybe. But I don't even know Ibarane's gender.

Who is Ibarane Zakuro?

Art from Bank 

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Everyone knew John's videos were fake. No one knew how he was faking them, but a title like "I Relocated the Loch Ness Monster" had to be fake. Nevermind there were videos posted by unrelated people of him exploring a city with a giant plesiosaur that could somehow walk on land. 

John was sitting next to his lawyer as the woman across from the table was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

"Please buy my house!" The woman was trying not to raise her voice. 

"Samantha," John was calm. "I'm a cryptid hunter. Why would you want me to buy your house?"

"There's..." Samantha to a deep breath. "There's a... Cryptid in my house!"

The lawyer looked over at John. She didn't like speaking. She knew she always sounded a bit off as she was a Bigfoot. "Samantha..." She spoke slowly to make sure that her voice was also calming and not off-putting. "I'm a cryptid. You're not afraid of me."

"Besides," John added, "My entire thing is relocating cryptids. I have no use for your house once I've removed them."

"Well..." Samantha sank down in her seat as much as she could. "It's..."

"I could pay your rent while I'm doing the work. Somewhere really nice." John smiled.

"I... I can't sell. Like, legally I can't sell it unless it's some sight unseen situation." Samantha shook her head. "I was so afraid, I had to leave. It was the Winter. I was so afraid!"

"Oh." The lawyer nodded her head. "The pipes burst and now you have black mold."

"Yes!" Samantha cried out. "It wouldn't matter if you said he was gone! I would still be terrified. I want to sell, rent out, whatever. But it's not dangerous enough to be condemned or for me to not be able to live there, but I can't just... Do that. The thing I need to do to be okay."

The lawyer opened up the folder in front of her. "This is way below market value." She looked a bit confused until it clicked together in her mind. "But you really want to get rid of it."

"I... I mean, your videos..." Samantha shook her head. "Like, and the rumors. Your parents were ultra rich and you have like... A lot of money."

"Well, I have to." John shrugged. "This work is expensive. I was the one who put this lovely Bigfoot through law school with no loans." He paused. "I don't need your house. I have plenty of property... But... Can you tell me about the cryptid?"

Samantha took a deep breath. "Yes, of course..." She closed her eyes to steady herself. "They call him Sleeper Jeff."

John and the lawyer just looked at each other. They were experts. They knew almost everything there was to know about cryptids... But that name was completely foreign to them.

"I'm sorry," John looked back to Samantha. "What is a Sleeper Jeff?"

"Well..." Samantha opened her eyes. "It's more of a who."

How Is Zakuro Ibarane's bank?

The bank is a five pitch CVVC! That's super cool. The pitches span from C3 to C5. The prefix map is incorrectly named, so you will need to rename it with file extensions visible to use it.

There was a small issue. The suffixes are missing from the aliases for like three of the pitches.

I try to be super polite and not talk too much about otos, but these ones... I can't blame the person who made them because you cannot see or hear anything because the samples are so quiet. So I committed some crimes.

The bank feels unfinished. It's... A bit of a mess. I think it would be possible to get pretty amazing results if you just don't use certain pitches. That's why I've rendered off two separate sections to show the differences in usage. This is just one of those utaus that would be difficult to get a great result from without a lot of work. It took me like two hours to get this! I do like the result from only using the C5 and F4 pitch. Those are just loud enough that I was able to get the otos to a decent state without committing crime. The lower pitches just... They were just so quiet, the spectrogram was too hard to even read.

Where can I download Ibarane Zakuro?

Here is the release video!