Vocaloid my beloved!!!!
I came across Vocaloid for the first time in 2015 when I made friends with a kid who’d recently joined my school. She was (and maybe still is) really into anime and got me into it. I don’t even remember what I watched, but somehow I also found Nightcore at the same time. With hidsight I realise that this combination of interests basically guaranteed that I would at least know of Vocaloid; it’s a damn venn diagram with Vocaloid being smack in the middle
Did I consume a lot of it? Not really. I knew the icons of the time (Rolling Girl, The World Is Mine, PoPiPo, Ievan Polkka etc.) but it never went beyond that and I fell out of touch with anime, Nightcore and Vocaloid in 2017.
Along comes 2020 and I get into anime again (the last anime I watched was Tokyo Revengers and that was in 2021 so it was very fleeting). It sort of opened up my interest in Vocaloid again, but again listening was sporadic
I went onto K-pop and had a decent time with it. I was definitely in it for the music over the community, but I’d stopped listening to it entirely in late 2022.
Now imagine you’re me. It’s 2022, and you’re in the middle of your exams. You decide to download Project Sekai. Definitely not a smart idea but you make it out the other end with decent grades and a new interest in Vocaloid, and this time you actually stuck around to give it a honest shot
I relistened to some of the classics as well as searching around for some newer stuff. It was actually really fun just finding random Vocaloid songs or listening to playlists to broaden my horizons. I don’t play Project Sekai anymore (it’s mostly because of my hatred of Gacha games) but the Vocaloid bug hasn’t gone away
All this to say that Vocaloid is one of my favourite genres of music. There’s so much diversity that can be found in both the music and the voicebanks. I know Utau and Vocaloid are technically different things but in my head they’re one and the same, and it’s really cool what people can achieve with this technology
In my head, I’ve always categorised it as a seperate thing from other music. Like. I’d have a top fifty favourite songs, and a different top fifty favourite Vocaloid songs. I’m not entirely sure why I do this, I just do; it might be because Vocaloid uses voice synthesisers, which have premade banks, rather than live or freshly recorded vocals
Either way, take a look to the side to see some of my favourites (songs, producers and voicebanks!); some of them might even be clickable >:3