Tell me about your VCV VB making experience!

[Gardanana]

I'm planning to record and produce my first VCV soon, so I wanted to hear some first-hand experiences about the process!

Some questions as a starting point if you need it: What do you wish you knew before you started? How long did the recording process take you? What were some of the biggest problems that rose up? What's your favorite part of the process?

No pressure at all here, just want to hear about some personal experiences ^^

 

[cloudyyskie]

Oh boy, I did this for the first time night before last, so my memory is FRESH
let me also say that this is just from experience, and my voicebank is nowhere near 'good' compared to other UTAUs

I'm gonna answer these in order so I don't get mixed up or repeat anything ^^

What do you wish you knew before you started?
honestly I wish I really knew what I was doing. the very first time I tried working with VCV I really just thought "oh it's like CV :D"
it's not
it's very different and semi confusing. I wish I knew how to record the first one properly, how to OTO (I still don't know how, I cheated and a very very amazing person volunteered to OTO my voicebank for me <3), how to set up OREMO and deal with error messages and whatnot, the list goes on. Let me just say that it is VERY different from CV in some aspects and you'll probably have to research a lot before you actually record it

How long did the recording process take you?
honestly mine only took about 30-45 minutes to record, however some people say it takes up to an hour or two. It all depends on your personally and your reclist

What were some of the biggest problems that rose up?
my lack of research and TOTAL lack of self confidence. My best piece of advice is to go in feeling confident, and if you load it in and it sounds terrible, just run to forums, do more research, change things around, and try again. In my experience it's just trial and error.

What's your favorite part of the process?
DEFINITLY the first time you plug it into UTAU. It's such an amazing feeling to hear your hard work singing through a computer program in a way I can't describe.
Also designing the UTAU is fun because you get to play the voice and make a design off of that. Recording's also fun, however I'm not too fond of it because my throat kinda hurts after

sorry if these answers weren't clear or all over the place haha

 

[xyompltrine]

this was like almost 2 years ago so I forgot most of the stuff

What do you wish you knew before you started?
using guide BGM's, I never thought I needed it. otoing was a pain because I never used one
How VCV worked, I never knew how VCV's worked at the time. The only thought process at the time was smooth singing utau lmao
VCV oto is more easy than CV It's just 3x bigger
don't use Naime Ritsu's VCV reclist, that has a lot of unneeded phonemes in there (like kwa gwi, I used it and the recording time was almost 2 hours)

How long did the recording process take you?
I'd say recording is around 30 mins-1 hour
otoing: otoing took like 1 month, but now it's like 1-2 hours

What were some of the biggest problems that rose up?
otoing, I never knew how big the oto was. (if you use kiyoteru's number duplicate aliases that will shorten the oto by alot, not really it's just removing the extra duplicates)
recording: I never used a BGM and I also didn't know what moresampler was so I manually otoed it, that was dumb

What's your favorite part of the process?
After it's done otoed, and you plug it into utau
the recording also

I don't know if this is helpful or not

 

[Thehyami]

Don't hold your consonants for too long. Like for example when you say "papa", there is going to be a pause between the syllables, right? That's when you press your lips together. Well, don't hold it for too long. It is better to have faster consonants than slower. And try to have consistent speed on every consonants.

 

[GeneralNuisance]

Don't force anything, try to pronounce things as naturally as possible. Record all the vowel strings as one long utterance, no pauses. Only do pauses on the VVs if you're recording glottal stops. Use Oremo with a BGM with the same number of mora as your reclist and record on the beats, that way, your recordings will be consistent. Have some water nearby and take breaks as needed.

 

[Kiyoteru]

If you've already created a CV voicebank and you're looking to "upgrade" to your first complex voicebank, I would actually recommend doing CVVC instead.

Recording process
VCV: At least 100 strings to record
CVVC: About 40 strings if using an efficient reclist

Configuration
VCV: Very simple to configure and everything is the same. But there are at least 700 lines of OTOing for a single pitch.
CVVC: More complex, need to pay closer to attention to the phonemes. But it should only be 200-300 lines of otoing for one pitch

Adding extra phonemes
VCV: A little complicated for adding extra consonants, need to pay attention to patterns to make sure every VCV combination is covered. Very complicated for adding extra vowels, need to make sure every consonant and vowel is taken into consideration for every possible VCV combination.
CVVC: Pretty easy to add extra vowels or extra consonants

Learning how to create other language voicebanks
VCV: Only applicable to Japanese and other languages with very few phonemes (hawaiian, toki pona, etc.) The amount of work will continue multiplying like CRAZY if you want to do something like English.
CVVC: You have to learn this anyway for other languages, so learning CVVC Japanese will give you a head start!