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Ghosty's Guide to japanese CVVC

In this tutorial I will be going over japanese cvvc, how to record it, how to oto it and how to use it, let's go!

Part 1: What is Japanese CVVC?

The answer is simple, really. It's Japanese consonant - vowel - vowel - consonant, and you might recognize the term from other languages with much more consonants and ending consonants such as English, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish. Now when you heard this you might ask, "why would Japanese need the ending vowels when they don't have any ending vowels?" and thats exactly what it's about. Japanese CVVC, in contrast to English CVVC, utalises the space between the end of the vowel and next consonant, while English utalises the whole consonant.

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As you can see, the english voicebank uses less of the vowel and more on the consonant, as it's the consonant that is important and the vowel is there for mere blending.
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While the English focuses on the actual consonant, the Japanese CVVC focus on the space between the ending of the previous vowel and the next consonant, without actually usng the consonant.

"Why should I use this?" you might ask, well first of the UTAU gets smoother with even less recordings than a standard CV bank. A standard CV bank has around 90 recordings, while a CVVC has around 45. Speaking of recordings, it brings me to my next point

Part 2: Recording

So you've decided that you want to make a CVVC voicebank? Great! If you've already recorded a VCV you're going to feel really familliar with CVVC, as the principles are the same, and if you haven't recorded a VCV, recording CVVC is really easy!

First off, you'll need the reclist. Here's a romaji verson of Delta_Kuro's CVVC, together with a base oto. In addition to this I recomend you use OREMO and guideBGM, a tutorial on that can be found here.

So you've got all you needed to record? Thats great! Now to actually recording. The weird strings of kana might scare you, but they aren't all that hard to master. Really you just sing out the syllables as the guideBGM play and there you go, with some practice you will be great at it (and also have the guideBGM song stuck in your head forever)

There are some weird symbols though, like ・ あ. Here below is a list on how to record them
・is a glottal stop (this is - in the romaji version of the list)
*vowel*breath indicates an ending breath
"

Part 3: OTO.ini

Now, this is the part of the CVVC that scares people the most. Usaly they wonder "how do I oto when theres 6 syllables on the same recording?" and the simple is easy my friend, offset and cutoff (AKA. Those blue lines). With the offset and the cutoff you can "cut out" everything but one syllable to play at a time, and voíla your utau sings only one syllable!

In addition to this I would want you to atleast read through this, but preferably use this as you oto. It's kuro_delta's guide on how to oto CVVC voicebanks and it's a great resource!

Part 4: How to use a CVVC bank

So your voicebank is recorded and oto'ed and now you want it to sing, but there isn't any CVVC ust's unless you're looking at English CVVC ust's, do not fret my friend because theres such a thing as a CVVC ust converter! No need to edit everything manualy as it would be rather tedious. Giraffey even made an english patch for it, with a video tutorial follow!


Thank you for reading my tutorial, I hope you found it informative! If you have questions please contact me and I will do my best to help you!
Author
Ghostysenpai
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While a start, this resource does gloss over a few important details, such as what the oto values actually do and the differences between the two methods.
And it does Neglect to explain how to manually fit ust by hand and fix mistakes caused by the plugin.