Wiki Wednesday #343 - Shiroanne Fukanato / シローアン・フカナト

 I gotta stay up way too late...

Wiki Wednesday #343 - Shiroanne Fukanato / シローアン・フカナト

Shiroanne is a very sick young woman. Only singing helps her pain. Anything that stops her from singing, like eating, causes her pain.

This UTAU may be triggering to those who struggle with eating disorders.

Who Is Fukanato Shiroanne?

Art from official site

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Escaping the flimsy excuse of the framing device (though it touches on Fruity Loops), I feel like I need to say something about virtual instruments or VSTis.

People were mean to me and told me that the instruments I used sounded cheap. The thing is... I had zero money and a 7 GB monthly data limit. I couldn't pirate expensive stuff if I wanted to because of the data cap. People insulting me offered no advice. Just said to Google it when I was already using obscure stuff that no one had heard of because I had exhausted Google. 

Free VSTis are insane now. Like... The free stuff today makes the expensive stuff a decade ago sound like you're using a MIDI player. But, there's more to can do to make your free instruments sound stellar!

In the vocal synth fandom, we all know how important tuning voices is, but it's also important to tune your instruments! The easiest way to do this is using a humanize feature on your midi. This is like anti-quantization. Where quantization snaps everything to a grid, humanization adds randomness.

I don't really use that often because I like things being in time. The humanization can also add variations in the intensity of each note. I prefer to change the intensity / velocity / volume manually so that it's more coherent. (I think Intensity was what it was originally called in UTAU, velocity is what it is called in REAPER, and volume is what I hear UTAU users call it.)

How big of an effect this has depends on the virtual instrument you're using. Sometimes, it just makes the sound louder. Sometimes, it picks a different sound bank depending on the velocity.

One super important thing that helps a lot is using a tool like Lunker's guitar script for REAPER to make guitar chords actually sound strummed. It offsets the beginning of the note. Another important step is likely to lower the velocity of each note. That way, you're not getting yelled at and risking clipping by each note being too loud! 

There's also things like editing the pitch of the MIDI to get bends and slides. 

There's a ton of reasons you might be forced to use less than ideal virtual instruments. I only use one specific soundfont on my tablet because there's just not space for several high quality instruments. But with care for how you tune your midi files and the effects that you add, you can make even the silliest little instrument from the year two-thousand sound pretty!

By the way, just bumping up saturation can blow your mind. Tasteful reverb can melt things together. Limiters can really chomp down on the sound that you want! It's so much fun to create and mix songs!!

If you're afraid to get started, I definitely think asking ChatGPT for advice is a really good step. It's really very scary to jump into something so technical with no one holding your hand.

How Is Shiroanne Fukanato's bank?

Shiroanne has many banks in development but only has one bank available for download at the time of writing. It is a single pitch CV bank. Her voice is very nice!

Where Can I download Fukanato Shiroanne?

You can find her on her official site. She is cool!