#i love you vocaloid producers

[andifthestarsweretodie]

i love you deco*27

[r-aindr0p]

Dancing samurai redraw February 2024/ June 2022

Still my favorite vocaloid despite having nothing to eat for ages

Also hello proseka ??? You did an event on the evilious chronicles songs, the 7 deadly sins, why do I count 6 songs in the game ??? I’m genuinely so mad they did Gakupo dirty like that and didnt even include his song even though it was also created by the same composer as the other 6….

Alt version of the purple guy under the cut

[mintjeru]

dark type 🌙

open for better quality | no reposts

[mayoiayasep]

i know there’s the gatekeeping feeling from people who were originally into vocaloid towards pjsk fans and tbh i understand that but also god i really am grateful for project sekai for helping me getting further along in listening to vocaloid. like i probably would’ve gotten into it eventually but it’s a lot easier for me to get obsessed with music when there’s characters for me to also get attached to. thank you miku game<33

[cowboy-robooty]

vocaloid producer mascot (sona?) doodles

[bmpmp3]

Yes.......YES.......

[lisxdumbr]

I need friends with enough vocaloid knowledge willing to hear me cry about the new voice synthesizers and how I'm happy about the old voicebanks getting revamps (to say it somehow) and IA upgrades which are AMAZING, but depressed about the current state of the cryptonloids and how they're becoming obsolete because they're focusing more in becoming consumption products as game characters and not as voicebanks anymore

[mrstinderstauf]

Not sure all that you've answered so i'll send a few numbers! 28, 53, 80

Spotify Wrapped Ask Meme

#28: Showtime Ruler by Karasuyasabou feat. Kagamine Rin!

#53: ONESELF by Twinfield feat. Hatsune Miku!

#80: Treat Me (So Right) by Circus-P feat. Megurine Luka!

[cerealandchoccymilk]

was fucking bewildered just now bc i saw someone call r-906 obscure. but then i remembered that 99% of western vocaloid fans' favorite song is world is mine

[jamiepaige]

Constant Companions Closeup #11: MACHINE LOVE

(also on bandcamp and spotify!)

Welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Yesterday was the title track, My Darling, My Companion, which means today is the final track on the album - a song about the truths that lay in hiding within artifice, and a computer falling in love - Machine Love!

Before we get started on this particularly long closeup - I'll be doing a follow-up post after this one, answering various miscellaneous questions I've gotten over the course of writing these! If you've got anything you wanna hear more from me about, album-related or otherwise, feel free to reply to this post or send me an ask! It may very well end up part of the bonus closeup :~)

---

Let's circle back to the very first track, Dyad.

In that track's closeup, I mentioned the main sonic touchstones of this release relative to my previous ones being guitars and vocal synths. The whole guitar rock thing I think I've gone into detail enough about, what with all the inspirations I've rattled off in other posts, but there likely is still a burning question for some long-time listeners.

Why vocal synths? Why am I not singing on like half of this album? I thought you were a singer, Jamie Paige, so what is this Hatsune Miku robot Vocaloid crap?

Truth be told, the Vocaloid scene and community has always been a massive source of inspiration for me. So much of my favorite music ever, music that inspires me or touches my heart or makes me go apeshit, has been sung by synthesized vocalists in a language I don't even speak. I grew up with it, and it's grown up with me - music just as intricate, mind-boggling, twisted, fun, and ridiculously creative is being put out every single day by vocal synth producers, and nowadays it's coming from English speaking musicians in droves!

Before this year began, I'd made at least one major contribution to the culture, but in spite of my genuine adoration of everything vocal synth related, I felt like I was just looking in from the other side. Caught between worlds, existing outside of any communities, simply gesturing vaguely towards what I wanted to do.

But I wanted more! I wanted to make the same kinds of things that stirred my heart and made me want to write! I wanted to sing with those same voices! I wanted it to be true - to be like you!

---

I won't lie to you and tell you Kasane Teto has always been my favorite vocal synth. That title used to go to GUMI, and in general, I wasn't particularly attached to any UTAU voicebanks as a younger vocal synth fan. (Nowadays, I genuinely open up OpenUTAU just as much as SynthV because I've fallen deeply in love with Adachi Rei, but that's a story for my next album.) Obviously, I knew of Teto, and found her presence in things like Triple Baka delightful, but for the most part, she was mostly something of an oddity, a wayward piece of vocal synth history that had her Fans like any other.

However, there was one Teto song I've been inexplicably attached to since the moment I first heard it - Song of the Eared Robot, by nwp8861. I was introduced via this particular cover, which I love, but I quickly gravitated to the original. Something about the warbly, childish nature of her very first voicebank, the ambitiously orchestrated and unabashedly digital instrumental, the lyrics referencing fundamental frequencies and Markov chains and compiling code all just spoke to me!

That song stuck with me, laying in a part of my heart that had been collecting dust, all the way to April of 2023.

Now, yes, Teto wasn't always my favorite, and I had other vocal synths I was attached to, but I don't live under a rock, and I still understood how monumental the announcement of Kasane Teto's Synth V voicebank was - to the point that I interrupted a call full of FFXIV-playing friends who knew barely anything about vocal synths and gave them an impromptu TED talk because I was so excited.

(An excerpt of a summary of that night's events, written the morning after. i was up my own ass a little bit but in my defense Kasane Teto had just been announced for Synthesizer V)

I was watching, in real time, a dream made manifest. It's literally one of the Bits with Teto! That she'd be a Vocaloid one day too! And here she was, on the fan favorite engine, sounding genuinely fucking incredible. Especially in hindsight, it's such a beautiful and perfect twist of fate for her.

I saw myself in her. A weird little outcast, explosively reborn and thrust straight into a community's open arms with love. I wanted it to be true - To be like that, too.

It didn't fully hit until later, hearing another cover of a song I'd almost forgotten.

Machine Love, my love letter to the entire world of unbridled creativity and artistry surrounding vocal synths filtered through one sentimental little song, was fully written by the start of May, maybe 4 days after I had gotten my hands on Teto SV and long before a certain compilation album was even a glint in my eye.

If you haven't heard DAEMON/DOLL yet, you really, really, really should go listen to it - yes, I mastered this album, many of my friends and collaborators are featured, and I have two entire songs on it, but I genuinely mean it when I say I believe it's some of the best fucking music that's come out this year in general. In many respects, it also feels like a companion (hah) to Constant Companions.

I had finished writing Machine Love by this point, but it was working on this album in its entirety - discovering artists like Anh Duy, Eggtan, and beat_shobon through it, and hearing everyone in top form making this twin-drilled chimera fucker sing her heart out - that not only made me confident in my decision to go down this artistic path, but that made me fall completely in love with Kasane Teto. And honestly, how could I not? She feels like a microcosm of everything that makes vocal synths so special, this community of creatives all leaving their marks and touchstones along the trail of a great big shared folk mythos. Yeah, maybe the folk hero we're all collectively mythologizing is an anime girl, but yknow maybe Odysseus could take some branding cues from hatsune miku idfk

Basically, even if he says he wants to kill me, I owe fucking everything to rice for inviting me to work on DAEMON/DOLL.

---

On that note, my vision for Machine Love's MV was pretty clear from the beginning.

the actual factual setup for the above shot, which was done entirely in-camera with my laptop, a tv, and two video files manually synced using VLC

The fundamental idea was always there - live-action shots of animation playing back on various screens, edited together to feel somewhat seamless. However, I really struggled with what exactly was going to be on said screens for a while; Big commissions were very far out of my budget, but I knew this song needed something grandiose.

Ultimately, what I arrived at was exactly the kind of scrappy, DIY bullshit it was always meant to be.

I asked my Twitter mutuals for help. And spent a couple months in Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion hell turning all the Teto art I got into a bunch of tiny little mini MVs, some of them parodying real vocal synth MVs, some of simply just evocative of vocal synth MVs, all of them painstakingly edited by yours truly and filmed with the help of some friends over the next couple months across two states and many more cities just to be painstakingly edited and synced up again by yours truly.

THE NEXT MV I DO WILL BE SMALLER IN SCOPE

---

And with that, I believe that's the album!

There's a reason it ends with Machine Love, and not with the title track. I do think that in some respects My Darling, My Companion would have made a better closer, but that song only really resolves one of the thematic strands running through the album.

There isn't really a definitive answer to the specific question "Baby, do you know what you wanna hear?", but it evokes a theme running through the entire album - wanting something, knowing that you want something, and simply needing to find the courage to do it or say it or be it. My Darling, My Companion is in many ways a declaration of intent, an acceptance of what needs to happen, but Machine Love, to me, is that action being done. The words being said!

And now, if I may give this a somewhat selfish tint - with the explosive response my works from this album have gotten, my contributions to things like DAEMON/DOLL and Flavor Foley, the collaborations I've done and that I still have in the pipeline, the friends I've made and the community I've found a spot for myself in, and the newfound voices that I can lay my heart bare with -

Well, shit, I know what I wanna hear, and I've gotten to hear it. I'm a vocaloP. It's real!

Thank you all so goddamn much for reading and listening. I'll see you back here either tomorrow or Monday for the bonus AMA post thing!! Make art and be gay, motherfuckers.

❤️💚

[chimyku]

"The two of us were connected with our hands held together."

Jelsa siblings AU?!

(Guys hear me out xD)

I recently rediscovered one of my favorite vocaloid songs, "Adolescence" by producers Signal-P and Orange, and I also remembered that some people said Jelsa looks like siblings, so here's an illustration based on that! Go listen to the song as well: https://youtu.be/u-YH22ijXhs?si=GN6U2xPPZw2b3ROv

I like this version better though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHglIaco2fE

I often hear/read about how Jack and Elsa can pass off as siblings because they supposedly look alike. I personally don't think they do (or maybe that's the shipper in me talking lol) just because they are both light-haired, blue-eyed, and have a pale complexion. I mean, both their hair and eye colors are different shades anyway, that has to count for something, right?! XD

If you haven't heard of the song before, there are basically two major interpretations to it: it can either be viewed as a platonic or romantic relationship between twins. The overall idea is that, as adolescents, they realize that they're growing and that things are no longer the same. By that, no longer the same physically—as in their once similar facial features, hand sizes, etc. are all different now— and from a social standpoint, where it is no longer acceptable to do some things that were so normal for them as twins, such as sleeping in the same bed together (like I said before, you can view it however you like; be it either as the innocent indignance of close-knit twins who were suddenly made to distance themselves, or a tale of forbidden incestuous love). Most vocaloid songs, including this one, are up to interpretation anyway. I might be slightly off though, it has been quite a while since I've delved into the meanings of vocaloid songs. Whether or not to consider this jelsa piece as platonic or romantic, it's also up to you hehehe.

Here's a lovely fanfic I've found from @oni-no-ko that has Jelsa as twins (which reminded me of this song!). Mind the rating before you read it, don't say I didn't warn you XD: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10339919/1/Behind-Frosted-Doors

I have mixed feelings about this artwork. I haven't tried this art style in a while and though I like how it turned out, I'm not satisfied with the hands lol they're the bane of my existence xD. I also kept going back and forth modifying random parts of the artwork, so I decided to finally post it because I will never be done with it at this rate xD.

[merriclo]

need to get more of these with the other vocaloids the goats* aren’t included in this one. what a shame

*this user knows very little about vocaloid and doesn’t know who the goats are by any means. do not listen to them.

deep cleaning my room and i found my vocaloid stickers!!!! not too many of them but hey that’s cool. i’m def putting a miku sticker on my fan

[odysseyeurobeat]

Literally just me gushing about eurobeat

Y'know what? Tumblr, you get a little treat. I don't have much better of a place to post something long-winded like this, so here we are.

I love eurobeat music. Big surprise from the girl with it in her handle, right? But I don't just love one kind of eurobeat. No, I'd go so far as to say I love it all. This genre becomes an absolute buffet of delightful, energetic, silly fun when you forget about trying to look for ways it "doesn't count", and try to look for the ways it does.

I love early eurobeat! I love the stuff that's indistinguishable from early Italo Disco, the formative things where the tempo was still low and the disco vibes were still high! That's Eurobeat and the first few volumes of Super Eurobeat are great for this!

I love later eurobeat, too! Even if some of the sounds aren't always my favorites, I love that folks were trying new things and dabbling with new sounds, experimenting in ways that in previous years seemed prohibited! Comparing some aliases who have been going for multiple decades from this period to when they started is also super fun!

I love traditional eurobeat, if I could pick a name for it! Faster, more rave-influenced, whether or not it's still got some disco elements in it, themes about nightclubs and love and loss and betrayal and that ever-ubiquitous fire! Maharajah Night has some great examples, leading into the bulk of pre-200 Super Eurobeat volumes!

I love J-Euro! It turns out, folks in Japan have different ideas and tastes and approach the genre VERY differently than the folks in Italy do, and I love how it sounds! I love how the sound design is so different and the speed jumps a little higher!

I love indie eurobeat! I love hearing how new and amateur producers take a crack at the sound, and seeing what folks do as the tools for making it grow and evolve! Even virtual versions of the synths the masters used to use are available now, and it's fantastic to hear how those things sound in new hands! I love the ways indie producers bend, break, and work around the rules of the genre and still deliver a uniquely "eurobeat" experience! Without this category, I would never have found DJ Command, DJ Bouche, Turbo, Vikas Beatbox, the Galaxian Recordings crew, and so, so many more!

I love happy eurobeat! The nature of the genre makes it so straightforward to pair its signature energy with joy, delight, empowerment!

I love sad eurobeat! That very same energy that powers joy and happiness can be just as powerful for driving home sorrow and sadness, and some lyrics even carry strong emotional weight (we're well past the days of eurobeat being only about Burning Love Car Baby Fire Desire Tonight Drift Tokyo, y'know)!

I love fandom eurobeat! Yup! Vocaloid, Touhou, MLP:FiM, Vtubers; whatever you may be a fan of, chances are good there's a eurobeat remix out there (or even an original) that suits your fancy!

I love Initial D eurobeat! How could I not, right? The classics are classics for a reason, and eurobeat and drift racing are a uniquely fantastic pair. Of all the things eurobeat could be about, it's one of a few that really knock it out of the park!

I love feminine eurobeat! Masculine eurobeat is great too, but it already gets a lot of love in the other categories, so I want to celebrate those eurobeat songs that feel quite the opposite while still being perfectly eurobeat! Eurobeat is broad enough to express feelings like this, too!

I love songs that aren't quite eurobeat, but have elements of it! And I love eurobeat songs that heavily include elements from other genres, too! Eurobeat is like any other genre-- it has not always had the same chances to rub shoulders with other sounds in the dance space, but when it does, some wonderful things happen! And the whole music world is enriched for that cross-pollenation!

I love the songs I used to dislike! To think I'd go from vastly disliking Norma Sheffield's discography, to adoring it so fully! Disliking "Higher Higher More and More" to seeking it out from time to time! Not being fond of SAIFAM/BBB's style, to knowing some of its songs by heart!

And most of all, I love that I get to MAKE this stuff for a living! I do not take the fact that this could've not worked out trivially, and I hope I've rewarded your patiences well with a lot of new favorites and starting points for diving deeper into the genre over the last... almost 20 years, now!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg! I understand some eurobeat isn't to everyone's taste, but I think if you haven't tasted all that there is out there, you owe it to yourself to see how you feel about it. You might be pleasantly surprised!

[grizzlyofthesea]

Remember when these guys were the "Big 8" of the Vocaloid scene? (Artwork below by Hanasoumen-P)

Good times. It's amazing how far vocal synths have come, and I love some of the more recent characters who have been introduced, but this specific group will always be nostalgic to me. They're icons of the 2010s internet.

The Cryptonloids will always be famous thanks to Miku, and GUMI (my favorite) has been doing well since her V6 release, but I hope Gackpo gets to shine again someday. He is being marketed as part of Internet Co.'s main trio (him, GUMI, and Una), and he got to perform at their Lively Paradise concert earlier this year. I just hope we get some more producers, old and new, using him. There's maboemu, whose songs are...interesting, but they also lean into the "instrument" aspect of Vocaloid and do some intriguing, unnatural things with Gackpo's voice. But the eggplant samurai was way more prominent a decade ago. That's what I want. His voice is so nice, even if he's been stuck on V4 for what feels like forever. He deserves more usage.

But enough about me. Let's hear from you!