cosMo@BousouP’s Voice Articulation of VOCALOID／20th anniversary of VOCALOID（YAMAHA VOCALOID）

cosMo@BousouP Interview/ 20th anniversary of VOCALOID

cosMo@BousouP Profile and Comment

【Profile】Composer/Sound Creator produces game music, character songs, Vocalid songs. His major works include “Hatsune Miku no Shoushitsu”, “Hoshi No Shoujo To Gensourakudo”, and “For UltraPlayers”.

I’ve been with Vocalo so long, for 17 years out of its 20 years of life. I hope that this good environment for creative works will continue for 30 or 40 years, not just the 20th anniversary, because the soil for creation made by VOCALOID is super wonderful. I hope that VOCALOID will continue to contribute to the scene too.

cosMo@BousouP’s first post “Dennou Skill” x Hatsune Miku V3

ーYour first post was “Dennou Skill” in 2007, which was 1 month after Hatsune Miku’s release. Did you already use DAW before it?

cosMo＠bousouP　Yeah pretty much. I was making instrumental music before I introduceHatsune Miku, so I had already been using DAW back the, just under a year though. When I started producing music, I wasn’t really good at singing, nor I didn’t have connection with vocalists, so I was making instrumental music.

ーDid your enthusiasm toward DAW chage after introducing Hatsune Miku?

cosMo＠暴走P　My motivation was completely changed since I could do music with vocal. I had completely changed my mid to produce vocal music, so I was really impressed by the fact that a software that could create singing so well had been released.

ーWhat was the trigger of buying Hatsune Miku and VOCALOID2?

cosMo＠暴走P　One of my seniors in college was a deep user of Nico Nico Douga, and he told me like, “hey cosMo, if you want to make music, I heard that there is something called Hatsune Miku.” and I remember saying, “I didn’t know that thing exists,” and looked it up. Then I heard “Koisuru VOC@LOID” by OSTER project, whom I already knew because I had already made instrumental music, and I remember I was like, “Wow!”.

ーWhat was your first impression of Hatsune Miku?

cosMo＠暴走P　It was just fun. It’s so handy to be able to program a melody that came into my mind and it immediately turn into a singing. There were some preliminary problems, such as pitch not being able to catch up. But I think it was better than the VOCALOID1 era. I didn’t have much skills at the beginning, so my Miku in my first post song “Dennou Skill,” was really tone-deaf, but she gradually became a better singer as my skills improved.

ーYour works might have more chance to be listened since the beginning?

cosMo＠暴走P　Yeah, actually my VocaloP name is came from my second posted song “Hatsune Miku No Bousou”, so I was really lucky to be able to have a representative song under a month. I remember there was much more reactions which couldn’t be compared with before, when I was doing only instrumental stuff.

ーYou have been consistent in your musical style for 17 years.

cosMo＠暴走P　It’s because I like it. People often say same thing to me. I used to play music game a lot, and I really liked fast songs or really dense songs used in those games. I almost want to produce that kind of songs.

ーWhat kind of music did you listen while you were in school?

cosMo＠暴走P　I often bought soundtracks from music games when I was in junior high school and high school. There was a game called “GuitarFreaks & DrumMania”, which actually plays the guitar and drums in amusement arcades, and I collected every single soundtrack of that game.

ーThat’s a real fan. I like your hard rock style arrangement, and is it cultivated from “GuitarFreaks & DrumMania”?

cosMo＠暴走P　Yes it is. I can do GuitarFreaks but can’t play the actual guitars…. I also learned how to program drums patterns and fills from DrumMania.

ーIt is same for double bass drum?

cosMo＠暴走P　 Yes, I program it from the feeling I got while paying DrumMania. I have never played the real drums. I have been playing the piano so I have a bit of experience in real musical instrument.

ーSo you started you music carrier.

cosMo＠暴走P　Yeah it’s true, but I didn’t think becoming professional music creator at all. I was just thinking a musician originated from music games would be really rare, and there might be something great by combining Hatsune Miku and music game style feeling. Although there were already many people doing same stuff.

ーFor Vocalo-P, sasakure. UK and so on, right?

cosMo＠暴走P　Exactly, but I was doing it without noticing that at that time. For music games sound becomes suer-human like according with increase of difficulty, and I wanted to express that feeling on vocal part using VOCALOID. I made these super high density melodies that are unable for real human because of that. But amount of lyrics had become 3 time as usual after I started making it.

ーEven it is superhuman, the lyrics are still an important element of the song, right?

cosMo＠暴走P　Yeah so I had so much trouble at the beginning. I don’t really know how to write lyrics neither, so I just tried to crate my own version of Hatsune Miku’s backbone and wrote lyrics based on it.

ryo, the Vocalo-P whom cosMo@BousouP got influenced

ーWas there any other VocaloP influenced you when you started Vocalo-P works?

cosMo＠暴走P　It was rye from supercell. I could feel “Miku does exist here” like feeling from his songs. He illustrates cute girl with such a high resolutions, so I could think like it wouldn’t be strange at all if there is this actual 16 years old idol. I also really like Hachi too.

ーWere you drawn to Vocalo-Ps who were good at bringing out the charm of the character “Hatsune Miku” through the lyrics?

cosMo＠暴走P　I’m the type of person who thinks whatever I listen is good, but I had always listened to instrumental music for music games so I didn’t really understand what pop music was. When I listened songs by Hachi and ryo, I realized, “This is the kind of music that moves many people’s hearts!”, and then I realized that I wanted to write songs like that too.

ーThrough realization like it, is there anything new you became aware of when use VOCALOID?

cosMo＠暴走P　I shifted to bring Vocalo out more, but kept my style which was really fast anyway.

ーEach song has a different degree of outburst, and what kind of difference in mood is it coming from?

cosMo＠暴走P　This fast style requires a lot of energy anyway. It is a constant struggle with myself, and it is like the other me asks, “Why do you write fast songs? What’s the point of going fast with this content? Why not just use a regular tempo?”. If I can’t answer the question, “Why are you making a fast song?”, I can’t make a song, or make it slow down.

ーSo you mean you are in good condition if the song gets faster and faster?

cosMo＠暴走P　It’s more like I could write lyrics with a crazy world view. I want to be fast because I am incredibly excited about it.

cosmo@BousouP’s Voice Articulation of VOCALOID

ーTell us about voice banks you have.

cosMo＠暴走P　Hatsune Miku V4X, Kagamine Rin/Ren V4X, Megurine Ruka V4X, Megpoid V4, Otomachi Una V4, Yuzuki Yukari, Jun, and IA. These days I think I use Otomachi Una more frequently.

ーWhy is Otomachi Una your favorite?

cosMo＠暴走P　Because she has more punch. She really goes well with my fast songs, and really easy to hear the lyrics even I make her sing super fast. pretty amount of WAV files for dialogs are also quite handy.

ーRegarding with that, isn’t i hard to create attacks with Hatsune Miku?

cosMo＠暴走P　Yeah exactly. This is how I do; Make vocal loud and cut unwanted low with EQ, then apply bunch of something like comps that make attacks sharper a lot, then do slight distortion twice, then use a comp to enhance attack, then use EQ to cut annoying sound.

ーDon’t you use enhancers?

cosMo＠暴走P　I used to use enhancer a bit, but not so much now. It brought highs little too much and a bit killing my ears. If high is too much that makes you annoyed.

Various types of Hatsune Miku ware mixed for “Yaminabe!!!”

ー“Yaminabe!!!” is a song that can enjoy various Hatsune Mike at various speed. Why did you come up with this idea?

cosMo＠暴走P　This song was born from the concept of making a song that sounds really like a music games. Since the theme of the song is “Yaminabe” (a japanese party dish that everyone brings one ingredient and put it into a pot blindly, so everyone eat without knowing what’s in it), I thought it would be better to have a variety of voices, so I mixed them together like a dish, with the heavier parts being intense and the cuter parts being really cute. By that time, I had already created various types of Miku’s voices, so I adjusted them accordingly while remembering them.

ーThere was opera-like think nuance.

cosMo＠暴走P　There are opera-like voice, and a voice sound like she ingested helium, to have wide variety. Miku who appears at the first is the default I normally use, and its gender factor is around -10. Lower it make sound more sharp and she starts to sing clearly. For the opera-like part I raised gender factor a lot.

“Yaminabe!!!” Hatsune Miku till 14 sec is set to : LEVEL : ☆☆☆★★, TYPE：Yaminabe, VOCAL : Medium. For Voice Articulation, clearness : 0 (default), bright : 64 (default), gender : 48 is the setting.

Yaminabe!!!” Hatsune Miku around 35 sec is set to : LEVEL : ☆☆★★★, TYPE：Myth, VOCAL : Heavy. For Voice Articulation, clearness : 0 (default), bright : 64 (default), gender : 116 is the setting.

Yaminabe!!!” Hatsune Miku around 40 sec is set to : LEVEL : ☆☆☆★★, TYPE：Gothie, VOCAL : Very Light. For Voice Articulation, clearness : 0 (default), bright : 64 (default), gender : 20 is the setting.

*cosMo@BousouP uses numbers (0 to 127) at lower section of the editor for adjusting.

ーHow do you adjust the attack feeling of the vocal in order not to be buried to music that has so many notes and sound?

cosMo＠暴走P　 I use plugin effects within DAW. I use multi band compressors and such.

ーThere might be a time you can bring vocal sound more by layering octave and doubling parts but it make pronunciation muddy a bit. How do you deal with this problem?

cosMo＠暴走P　I sometimes change main vocal’s lyrics and change pronunciation itself from the scratch in such cases. If I feel “Ba Bi Bu Be Bo” don’t have enough impact, I use “Pa Pi Pu Pe Po” instead.

ーThere are fair amount of difference in sound between opera-ish vocal and heavy and fast vocal. How do you use different effects properly?

cosMo＠暴走P　For adjusting voice quality itself I mainly use Gender Factor, and supplementary adjust velocity and pitch. If I want to make it sound more husky I use Breath. For really heavy sections I use distortion effect for the guitars a lot, and for opera-like part I tough Xfer Records OTT would do a trick for me.

Make words more crisp ▶︎ Adjusting velocity

ーHow do you use note velocity?

cosMo＠暴走P　Due to the nature of the VOCALOID Editor, if you just leave small gaps between notes to create rests, they may not be perfectly separated and connect together, so I use it to prevent this. So I use it to prevent that from happening. I’d like to say it is essential for people who make fast songs.

I also use it when I want to insert a small “tsu”(a japanese letter to represent gemination). If you want to type the lyric “Itta,” you can start by typing “Ita” and then adjust the velocity of “ta”. It will sound like “Itta”. This technique can also be used when you want staccato-ish sound, or want to separate two notes crisply without connecting them to the previously voiced note.

Affecting groove feeling of the singing ▶︎ Open

ーAre there any other parameters to make fast singing more crisp?

cosMo＠暴走P　 I use “OPEN” parameter which controls how wide the mouth will be opened. By default, it is set to MAX, and lowering it gives a slightly closed mouth nuance. This makes the voice sound slightly delayed. By taking advantage of this effect, I created a slight variations in the monotonous sixteen-minute strokes, creating a kind of groove. This is just my own feeling, and it may turn out to be occult.

ーHow about pitch editing?

cosMo＠暴走P　Since those are really fast singing, it wouldn’t be a problem if the sound quality changed by hard pitch editing. So I use pitch snap mode. At the level of my songs’ tempo, it is not really bothering even it sound too much T-pain-like.

cosMo@BousouP’s review of VOCALOID6

【Check this out too!】
What is VOCALOID? From explanation of Vocalo culture to how to use VOCALOID. instructor : KagomeP

Let’s learn VOCALOID culture and how to use VOCALOID6 simply by a Vocalo-P Kagame P!

ーWhich function of VOCALOID6 were you impressed the most?

cosMo＠暴走P　It automatically adds breath. It is very convenient to be able to turn this on and off. I used to have to copy and paste WAV files to add breath so this saves me a lot of time from now on. Moreover, I can choose breath to be male or female, and how often do I want from three levels: Rarely, Sometimes, and Often. I found this to be very convenient.

ーI don’t think you put lot of breath for you songs, how about this?

cosMo＠暴走P　I don’t put breath except at the beginning of each phrase. I meant it would be great for other general Vocalo-P, rather than for myself. The thing I thought great was the Style Preset (under Inspector). This is also one of the function available in VOCALOID6 that adds effects normally applied in other DAW software, such as reverb or distortion.

　The style preset has three elements: TYPE, COLOR, and STYLE PRESET. If you turn off the effect choose No Effect from STYLE PRESET.

ーIt is VOCALOID6’s strong charm that it’s so multifunctional and you can complete all Voice Articulation within VOCALOID6 itself.

cosMo＠暴走P　People who will start using it since now, or beginners probably can do Voice Articulation without additional effects. Other than those functions I mentioned above, you can recall the Inspector by right-clicking a note, and you can choose presets for attack and release to make something like bend down effect or so. There was a preset called ENKA (kind of a folk songs of Japan), and it actually changed the sound enka-like so it was interesting.

ーHow are the things that got upgraded for VOCALOID6 going to match you songs?

cosMo＠暴走P　It has a variety of useful functions for pop songs that are worth to do Voice Articulation, so I think it will be very useful for creating songs that have a good balance of fast parts and regular choruses in a realistic way. It saves me a lot of time and effort, so I would like to use it in the future.

ーFinally, could you give cheering massage to those who wants to be a Vocalo-P?

cosMo＠暴走P　Cheer everyone up for the greatest music!

VOCALOID6 for Windows / macOS

■Bundled voice banks：16（VOCALOID6：AKITO、ALLEN、ASAHI、HARUKA、LUCAS、MICHELLE、SAKURA、SHION、ASAHI、TAKU、YUINA、NAOKI）（VOCALOID5：Amy、Chris、 Kaori、Ken）
※You can use VOCALOID3, VOCALOID4, VOCALOID5’s voice banks and project file（VSQX、VPR）
■Operating environment：Windows10, 11 （64bit）,macOS 13（Ventura）,14（Sonoma）,15（Sequoia）
■Specifications：https://www.vocaloid.com/en/vocaloid6/specs/