How to make a Japanese Vocaloid pronounce an english R

❤️PuririnLuka❤️

Arsloids Guardian
Defender of Defoko
I heard some amazing covers lately, and heard one of Galaco singing Plastic Love and her pronunciation for english words were amazing, and on soundcloud I heard Iroha pronounce the letter r perfectly on a english cover


 

szumek

Momo's Minion
I've heard that there are some opctions in v5 that can mess around with phonames and make them sound like english r, tho I'm not sure I'm a v4 user. The only way I ever do english r is with the "w" phoname, u can probably mess around with KotonoFader to mix the r parts from the jp vb with properly pronounce ones from an english one
 

FelineWasteland

Feral Catboy
Defender of Defoko
A lot of it is just tricking your brain into perceiving one phoneme as another one based on it's environment. Our perception of language is pretty malleable.

I'm not super familiar with vocaloid specifically, but like szumek said you can use "w"s to get an r-like consonant sound, since they're very similar phonetically, and more similar than English "r" is to Japanese "r". But you have to be careful otherwise they'll start sounding like Elmer Fudd lol

For an "r" at the end of a word, it depends on the preceding vowel, but a lot of the time you just blend it with a short "a" at the end, which is a kind of rough approximation of the mouth shape made for rhotics. "u" sometimes works, but that often ends up sounding more like an "l" or "w". These vowels/combos tend to work well for r-coloured vowels:
"nurse", "start" → just a
"north" → o + a, sometimes just o
"here" → i + a, sometimes i + u
"square" → e + a, sometimes e + u, sometimes just e
"cure" → u + a

What works best mostly depends on timing, the complete phrase the word is a part of, and which voicebank you're using. Just play around until it sounds good.
 
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dead_byte

Momo's Minion
You may want to note that in VOCALOID5, Haruno Sora has comes with some additional functions for Attack and Release. Those being "V Pronounce", which if I understand correctly, makes the vowel sound more like an English "uh" sound, and "R Release", which produces an English "R" like sound at the end of a phoneme. That said, I don't own Sora, so I don't really have a grasp on how these work in-editor, and how easy it is to use them to better replicate English, but it is something to note.
 
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