Unpopular Opinions

[+finnigen_amelia+]

is it just me or do I prefer more niche vocaloids?(I also like a lot of mainstream vocaloids such as Miku and Gackupo btw) cause like, I swear that nobody knows about Zunko, Mo Qingxian, Miki, and others aside from maybe a few viral songs that use them, such as Insanity which uses Miki. And before you all come running at me with pitchforks and torches, no, i'm not like "Oh YoU NEeD to KNoW niChE vOCaloIdS to Be a TRuE fAN lIKe ME!!" I just feel like there are many underrated vocaloids that should be more known in general, not that they all need to become mainstream, though I'm NOT saying that all niche vocaloids sound good though or deserve more recognition... cause like, sorry gachapoid, but you're kinda buns imo

 

[sunnyp4rk]

i like more robotic sounding voicebanks and older versions of certain vocaloids such as Miku, as i prefer her v2 voicebank over her others. Also, I feel Piko is over hated, just because a vocaloid is niche doesn't mean it automatically sounds good, just because a fan doesn't know some vocaloid from like -2 BCE with a thousand syllables name and only 1 original song with like two covers of some other niche songs doesn't mean they aren't a true fan, it doesn't matter if somebody's favorite vocaloid is extremely popular, the Miku/Teto duets aren't all slop and even if they kinda are they can be at least decent sometimes, new fans shouldn't be publicly shamed for getting things mixed up such as utaus vs vocaloids so long as they obviously didn't do it on purpose and try to learn this difference, I have a strong dislike for like 90% of English voicebanks for some reason that idk, and Chinese vocaloids deserve to be more recognized as i NEVER see them being used for any songs T_T

okay bye pls don't execute me

I don't think any of these are even unpopular opinions. These are almost all opinions I saw daily on VocaTWT when I used to be on there. Maybe the Piko opinion is different because I don't think people in the modern day hate his guts.

Also, I'm sure if you go to BiliBili you'd find a lot of examples of the Chinese Vocaloids being used. Not as much on Youtube or NicoNico (though Youtube has a lot of them).

 

[+finnigen_amelia+]

I don't think any of these are even unpopular opinions. These are almost all opinions I saw daily on VocaTWT when I used to be on there. Maybe the Piko opinion is different because I don't think people in the modern day hate his guts.

Also, I'm sure if you go to BiliBili you'd find a lot of examples of the Chinese Vocaloids being used. Not as much on Youtube or NicoNico (though Youtube has a lot of them).

good to know these aren't actually unpopular opinions for the most part, I just don't personally see them often myself so I assumed they were more unpopular opinions lol

 

[+finnigen_amelia+]

This centers around vocalost, but it's still an unpopular opinion as far as I know... I just feel like some songs should stay lost, and for various reasons, cause yes, well I am curious about what certain lost songs sound like other than the vocaranks we have of them, I know that it doesn't really matter if we get to actually hear the full song. not saying people have to stop trying to find certain lost songs, people can do whatever to find lost songs and idc about it, but I just feel that it doesn't matter if certain songs are found or lost, such as Dream Club and Sleepyx3 as many people want both songs found, but I don't care too much for them

 

[PunkishBear]

Huge agree. It doesn’t help that some parts of the vocalost fandom are very disrespectful to wiki spaces and producers. I don’t want to place value on individual songs, and I get that it sucks when producers start nuking their old stuff OkameP comes to mind, but sometimes I feel like that energy could be put to use finding songs with more historical interest too. I remember someone here posted about finding a defunct forum that had a bunch of no-longer-downloadable LOLA/LEON/MIRIAM songs from before 2009 and thinking “man, vocalost needs to get on THAT”. (But maybe someone IS out there looking, and I just don’t know because they’re drowned out by a million “I FOUND INTERFACE” posts.)

 

[Blue Of Mind]

I was just going to post my own thoughts about Vocaloid lost media until I saw the discussion! But my thoughts are more boring - mainly, I feel there's a lot of time being spent on songs that are either not that interesting or are just plain crap. I've listened to some songs that have been recovered recently, but the only thing I can think of is "Why were people looking for this? It sounds awful." I know being an indie scene, we have a much lower bar for what qualifies as a "good" song, and it's never fair to compare bedroom productions with professional ones, but I honestly think there's a reason some producers of lost songs deleted them in the first place lol.

I'm also sick of people screaming for Interface to be found, but this is mainly due to my personal dislike of Masa-P.

 

[cafenurse]

I'm the opposite, I was just thinking the other day about how I wish I had preserved all the vocaloid music I came across, even the stuff I thought was bad lol. Something about it just feels special and important to me. I also have a soft spot for indie music thats kinda "bad." Theres something so human and inspiring about is vs a commercial pop song that had a team of 20 people making it (and i still like commercial pop music, to be clear. love me some dua lipa)
Plusss, you never know who will just randomly really care about a song. I have a few songs I listen to frequently where I honestly think I am the only person who listens to them.

Not to say you're wrong to feel that way about it, I just thought it was funny because I was literally thinking about this recently.

 

[WacoWacko39]

You know I gotta say it 'Adolescence' blows 'Cendrillon' out of the water, and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't. Cendrillon is great don't get me wrong, but everytime I hear it I think "I could be listening to Adolescence rn" -w-.

 

[Beananium]

I wish that producers, voice providers and artists active in their discography or character's fandom didn't interact with their fans all the time. They often have to deal with constant entitlment and parasocial interactions from their fans, and sometimes are not equipped to handle a lot of those kind of interactions. The unprofessionality can seriously damage their songs or character's perception in the public eye.

A good example of fans being strange is when Naoto Fuuga posts about KAITO as a father figure to him. Its genuinely so lovely. But then you scroll down the replies and sometimes see vile sexual questions about KAITO, and even cyberstalking him to see if his casual tweets about doing his job and visiting a recording studio means a KAITO update is on the horizon. Leave the man alone!

And an example of when this can backfire on everyone is when the creator can not handle being under a large spotlight, especially when they are already going through a lot of distress already. Constantly engaging with their fans, with no established boundries for themselves and how they interact with others, often doing extremely unprofessional actions. The most extreme example would be Ghost and Pals and the situation that happened earlier this year.

Thankfully, the majority of creators just ignore the more agressively strange fans, and there are plenty of them who are quite pleasent. But it's still something I wish wasn't a problem in general.

 

[kaede00582]

* to me, ia is the vocal which represents the trend of samey "soft slightly mature female" V3 vocals. i find her voice's timbre unexciting. she sounds cold or bored in a lot of her songs - and not as an intentional stylistic choice. some producers force her to sound cutesy, but gumi does that far better. sorry ia fans.

* i do not like when meiko is tuned to have a deeper voice. adam edmond's meiko justice covers are objectively tuned well but the deep voice he gives meiko puts me off (to be clear this is my personal preference, not a criticism of adam edmond). a powerful voice does not have to be a masculine voice! also, i'm not saying she has to sound high pitched & cute like sakine meiko. her voice is wonderful without any changes to GEN and sounds even better when EQ'd to tone down nasality.

* speaking of nasality, i don't think cyber diva sounds as nasal as people say she does...? or maybe i'm just tone deaf haha.

* i wish crypton would directly port miku V2 to the latest synths instead of trying to recreate it as closely as possible with each update. this would give them more room to experiment with, for example, a hyper-realistic AI miku because the classic sound would always be available with the ported V2 voice. (i understand even a port would sound slightly different due to changes in the way each engine works, but i believe those changes would be relatively small compared to completely re-recording the voicebank)

 

[Beananium]

* to me, ia is the vocal which represents the trend of samey "soft slightly mature female" V3 vocals. i find her voice's timbre unexciting. she sounds cold or bored in a lot of her songs - and not as an intentional stylistic choice. some producers force her to sound cutesy, but gumi does that far better. sorry ia fans.

* i do not like when meiko is tuned to have a deeper voice. adam edmond's meiko justice covers are objectively tuned well but the deep voice he gives meiko puts me off (to be clear this is my personal preference, not a criticism of adam edmond). a powerful voice does not have to be a masculine voice! also, i'm not saying she has to sound high pitched & cute like sakine meiko. her voice is wonderful without any changes to GEN and sounds even better when EQ'd to tone down nasality.

i massively agree with IA having a voice that makes her sound detached.. While I feel like it can benifit a song when used properly (take Goboumen's A Realistic Logical Ideologist), a lot of IA originals are songs where a more expressive voice would've worked a lot of better. Orangestar is the most heartbreaking case; their music is so good, but their IA tuning + the fact I'm not the biggest fan of IA in the first place = I opt for covers when listening to their music.

However, I feel the opposite about Meiko. I actually prefer it when she has a more mature / deep voice over a high pitched one. There's so many higher pitched women already, and it can get to a certain point where I stop and wonder why the producer didn't just use a vocal like Rin or Miku instead. I do agree that her natural tone is beautiful as is as well! I think Meiko's slightly deeper but passionate voice covers a niche that no other Cryptonloid can cover (maybe len? but even then len has a lot more of a boyish voice). In the end I love to see Meiko cover and original song producers experement with her pitch.

OH for my own opinion on a Crypton Vocaloid's voice, I really wish Rin wasn't commonly tunned to be higher pitched then Miku. While they occupy a similar range, I feel Rin's rougher tone works a lot better at a slightly lower register; I find high-pitched Rin tuning turns me off to a song's vocals a lot more commonly then high pitched Miku tuning.

 

[kaede00582]

However, I feel the opposite about Meiko. I actually prefer it when she has a more mature / deep voice over a high pitched one. There's so many higher pitched women already, and it can get to a certain point where I stop and wonder why the producer didn't just use a vocal like Rin or Miku instead. I do agree that her natural tone is beautiful as is as well! I think Meiko's slightly deeper but passionate voice covers a niche that no other Cryptonloid can cover (maybe len? but even then len has a lot more of a boyish voice). In the end I love to see Meiko cover and original song producers experement with her pitch.

i guess what I'm trying to say is that I prefer meiko's natural tone over any kind of tuning, whether it's high or low pitched although the high pitched sakine meiko is my profile pic, i completely agree it feels like a waste to turn a unique mature voice like hers into something barely distinguishable from miku. i felt a bit sad listening to double me as she barely sounds like herself.

 

[Bookworm2]

Since we're on the topic of Meiko, I though I'd bring up my unpopular opinion regarding her! Meiko English is actually really nice, people just don't know how to use it. I've seen a lot of people try to cram her into songs that she is clearly not meant for, and from that they get that she's terrible. Most of the time I see this happen with rock songs, as despite of one her recommended genres being rock she has very little strength behind her. From personal testing, I've found that she tends to work best with pop songs and softer ballads, with maybe some lighter rock sometimes. Anything harder and she gets drowned out by the instruments. As well, 99% of the time people use her in way too high of a range. Her recommended range is B2-B3, and from my experience she tends to work well from about B2-A4, but people really love forcing her to sing in Miku or Rin's range, which English is just not at all suited to do. All this isn't to say she's perfect, far from it. I am aware that she is objectively a pretty poor quality voicebank. She's really muffled, like she's singing through cotton balls, she doesn't seem to know what an "end consonant" is, and some of her phonemes sound strange. But if you can work around these issues, Meiko English is a really pretty voicebank that people use in all the wrong ways, and that ruins it's reputation.

 

[Blue Of Mind]

Since we're on the topic of Meiko, I though I'd bring up my unpopular opinion regarding her! Meiko English is actually really nice, people just don't know how to use it. I've seen a lot of people try to cram her into songs that she is clearly not meant for, and from that they get that she's terrible. Most of the time I see this happen with rock songs, as despite of one her recommended genres being rock she has very little strength behind her. From personal testing, I've found that she tends to work best with pop songs and softer ballads, with maybe some lighter rock sometimes. Anything harder and she gets drowned out by the instruments. As well, 99% of the time people use her in way too high of a range. Her recommended range is B2-B3, and from my experience she tends to work well from about B2-A4, but people really love forcing her to sing in Miku or Rin's range, which English is just not at all suited to do. All this isn't to say she's perfect, far from it. I am aware that she is objectively a pretty poor quality voicebank. She's really muffled, like she's singing through cotton balls, she doesn't seem to know what an "end consonant" is, and some of her phonemes sound strange. But if you can work around these issues, Meiko English is a really pretty voicebank that people use in all the wrong ways, and that ruins it's reputation.

In all honesty, I think much of Meiko English's issues and misusages can be applied to all the Crypton English banks, especially Miku English before V6. They sound too soft and muffled compared to their Japanese banks, which limits their range and what genres they can sing, yet people still try to push them to their limits anyway and wonder why they sound terrible.

For now, the jury still seems to be out of Miku V6's quality in English, but already I can tell she sounds much smoother, powerful and understandable compared to the English concatenative banks.

 

[DefiantKitsune]

I'll also stick up for Meiko English as underrated just because she was the first Crypton Eng bank that had like, a normal speaking tone - the earlier three all sound a lot like they have something in their mouth.

Crypton English banks also have a narrow pitch range in addition to being soft/muffled which really limits them; I've always felt Miku v4x English was wildly overpriced for an instrument that can really only effectively manage an octave.

 

[Bookworm2]

Thinking about it, I actually prefer using more (not entirely) genre-specific voicebanks to more general tone voicebanks. With genre-specific ones, I can easily know if a voicebank will sound good with the song, I don't have to test anything regarding tone. But general ones? I can't really find a use for them! My best examples are Meiko vs Luka (v4x) English. Luka English has a general pop-adjacent tone, while Meiko is clearly geared towards light pop and ballads. When I look for songs for Meiko, I can easily think of songs that fit her niche, but with Luka? I have no idea! She, along with a lot of other voicebanks, is so general that I simply have no idea what to use her for! Why would I use a general voice that'll get the job done when I can use a voice that fits this niche? I might be rambling, so please tell me if this is incomprehensible and I will do my best to explain.

 

[bibbs]

* to me, ia is the vocal which represents the trend of samey "soft slightly mature female" V3 vocals. i find her voice's timbre unexciting. she sounds cold or bored in a lot of her songs - and not as an intentional stylistic choice. some producers force her to sound cutesy, but gumi does that far better. sorry ia fans.

i love ia, and have a lot of nostalgia for the peak for kagerou days and that whole era v3 era. i can see what your saying i guess, but i think a lot can be attributed to how ia is tuned. i've never used ia hands-on so i can't tell you how easy she is to work with, but guessing how she sounds from producers, she has a good sound by default, but can be challenging to tune properly. i think the community agrees with you more than you might think though. it seems like new ia songs are harder to come by unless they're from v3 veterans, even with new versions of her to play with.

maybe an unpopular opinion in it's own right, but i love ia cevio, she has way more character like one, and a little bit more of lia too, and solves a lot of the issues you raise about her being unexpressive.

 

[MagicalMiku]

IA is always good. Always

Thinking about it, I actually prefer using more (not entirely) genre-specific voicebanks to more general tone voicebanks. With genre-specific ones, I can easily know if a voicebank will sound good with the song, I don't have to test anything regarding tone. But general ones? I can't really find a use for them! My best examples are Meiko vs Luka (v4x) English. Luka English has a general pop-adjacent tone, while Meiko is clearly geared towards light pop and ballads. When I look for songs for Meiko, I can easily think of songs that fit her niche, but with Luka? I have no idea! She, along with a lot of other voicebanks, is so general that I simply have no idea what to use her for! Why would I use a general voice that'll get the job done when I can use a voice that fits this niche? I might be rambling, so please tell me if this is incomprehensible and I will do my best to explain.

Totally agree about that, and also, Luka english is very good with some particular type of songs, especially rock or techno. Here are some good examples from AVTechNO! (he likes to use english banks of both Luka and Miku for latin or ancient languages too):
These are incredible songs<3

And a good example of melodic rock song featuring Luka:♡

 

[Palamon]

Two unpopular opinions, I guess.

I'm sick of hearing the term "mikuteto" slop. Like, I get it, a lot of people are making Miku and Teto songs. But, it's not like Teto wasn't already extremely popular before the boom of Mesmerizer.

Also, Miku isn't that squeaky sounding, and whenever people take a song and "retune it" to "fix it" to make Miku sound deeper genuinely annoy me. Miku is a high pitched voice bank. If it bothers you so much, I don't know, use the Miku Dark append and make your own song and have a deeper sounding Miku or whatever.

 

[Grzesiek11]

The Japanese fandom and the English fandom don't have to be the same. Japanese people use vocalo (NOT Vocaloid) to mean vocalsynth, so they *are* making a distinction. We have an English word for vocalsynth, we can use it.

Here's an unpopular opinion. "Vocalsynth" is a lame word. Lowercase "vocaloid" is much better sounding, and genericized trademarks are nothing new. Yamaha also holds the trademark to「ボカロ」btw so this is not at all different to using the word "vocaloid" in English, it's just more common to shorten words in this way in Japanese. I wouldn't be opposed to using the word "vocalo" either, it sounds pretty sweet as well. Anything but "vocalsynth".

I'm convinced the word "vocalsynth" was invented by the Big English Speaking Community as a way to continue selling Teto Is Not A Vocaloid to new fans.