What Exactly Makes an Utau Difficult to Use?

Arissa

Ritsu's Renegades
Defender of Defoko
Hi once again, my UF dwellers! I kinda had passing thoughts about this topic on and off for a while, and am deciding to ask about it now. I hear certain voicebanks like Gahata Meiji, Momone Momo(and my own a lot of the time, but I don't really have the expertise to give much insight probably oto stuff and other factors ;^^) are 'difficult to use'. I never really hear so much about why and how. Those voicebanks seem to have good otos and all and sing fine, but I'm curious as to what exactly makes banks like Meiji and Momo's difficult to use/sound good. How do you know you've got a difficult voicebank on your hands? So just offer up your thoughts since I'm pretty curious. ^-^
 

Sors

Local Guppie & UTAU Korean Advocate
Tutor
Defender of Defoko
Now it really does depend on every voicebank, however I as the self-titled Meiji master, and well Meiji lover, can say, that what makes Meiji hard to use is her volume problems. Some notes are sung to quietly, which is common for her, so she's more difficult to use when mixing. As for tuning, her lower notes can suffer a lot from the wrong pitchbends. As VB specific things, her C5 Pitch for Fairy can be too strong for the voicebank, and in Hunter, her E5 Pitch can sound weird and distorted when tuned wrongly. At least that's what I've experienced. as for momo, I can't say much since I never used her.
 

HulderBulder

Retired User
Retired User
Defender of Defoko
The difficulty of a bank depends on alot of different things: pronouciation, oto, how easy it's to edit ust to make them sing, aswell as how easy it's to mix them. There are probably more stuff that makes voicebanks harder to use, but those are the first things that comes to mind.
Another thing to have in mind is the type of the voice that can make it harder to use on certan songs. For example if the voicebank is a strong vocal and doesn't have an alternative append, it's harder to use it for songs that prefer softer vocals. Though most people will avoid this problem, mostly because if they like a certan voice type they tend to like the music that usually is accompanied with those vocal types.

I don't really use Meji or Momo so I can't really tell what specifically makes them difficult.
 
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partial

Guest
Quality goes into it, as well. This is more Vocaloid related, but Len is and has been my favorite since the very beginning and he is notoriously hard to use because of his quality and his initial voicebank's inability to smoothly transition between vowels. I think this can carry over to UTAU, too. I'm not meaning low quality recordings make an UTAU bad, per se, but generally voices that don't bring clear results are labelled 'hard to use'. I think microphone quality is a large factor, as well as ability to sort of hold a pitch during recording. Noise removal of low quality samples does well for cleaning up, but it can distort the vocals within the sample as well. I guess the last thing I can think of for now is consonants (I feel like I have very loud consonants compared to my vowels) and mixing. My samples are fairly quiet, but my consonants, especially s, are much more prominent, so mixing can be pain.
 
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☆彡иα∂ιѕ☆彡

Ash Ketchum
Supporter
Defender of Defoko
meiji is hard to use because personally i've found that her low range suffers millions. her fairy bank in particular. i've tried adding G flags to make her sound less nasally and sad but it does not aid the cover in any way. since i deleted her banks, i'm only guessing when i say that she doesn't have one bank with multiple pitches such as falsetto, whisper, or anything that really assist with making a "realistic" utau cover.

another things that contribute to the difficulty of the bank are oto, pronunciation, and audio quality. Pitches can also be hard to use (falsetto, strong, whisper all in one bank) as inexperienced users won't know how to use them in a ust effectively.
 

Sors

Local Guppie & UTAU Korean Advocate
Tutor
Defender of Defoko
meiji is hard to use because personally i've found that her low range suffers millions.
Oh yes, gotta agree with that OTL However this applies more to Fairy than it does to Hunter, as Fairy's lowest pitch is C#4. It could also be her Prefix Map and her pitches in general.
 

OngakuCD

Ritsu's Renegades
Defender of Defoko
Inconsistency, rendering, and pronunciation.

From my own experience with my utau Abrielle, I consider her hard to use. Her voice is not something to simply plug-n-play cause her pronunciations can be tricky and her voice can be all over the place. Also, her voice only sounds good with certain types of genre. I love my utau, but I can't sometimes. This is why I'm redoing her entire bank and hoping it will be able to be used by other people
 

MintyR

Ruko's Ruffians
Defender of Defoko
Oto IMO is a BIG factor...in my personal experience I've had hard time using many UTAUs because of poor (including my own, FLOWER to be exact) :blink:
 

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