ラグトレイン / 猫又おかゆ (cover)
Added 2024-11-11 23:35:12 +0000 UTCThank you Renaldo for the Patreon Request!
Comments
"Don't have access to a singer" I don't really see how that is possible but perhaps. The arts community is everywhere. It's like one of the things that has existed throughout the human experience. I guess if you are locked in your room by your parents and not allowed out...
DrumRollTony
2025-10-28 15:35:01 +0000 UTCyou were talking about the whole thing where like a human wouldnt breathe like that which is totally correct, even my favorite vocaloid producer siinamota struggled with this when he worked with a real singer for the first time. To be completely honest, im mostly with you, i prefer human voices to vocaloid if possible but for me like good music is good music and if someone isnt a singer and doesnt have access to one so i think i dont have as big a problem with it as you do. for me i just see it as another way people try to get their sound out there rather than an attempt at replacing the human voice entirely. So while I do get what you mean by erasure i can only partially agree with it. So yeah TLDR; while i totally agree that human voices are better than Vocaloid by a long shot but i also understand the other side too. then again i only listen to 2 vocaloid producers on a regular basis so i also get why you just wouldnt like the sound.
Nebula
2025-10-28 08:52:59 +0000 UTC@Ryo (Just to make it clear, I'm not trying to argue with Tony about why he should like or dislike Vocaloid, I'm just clarifying things because what you said is not exactly accurate) It was not just about not having singer available tho. One of the appeals of using Vocaloids back then and still to this day is that Vocaloids are also characters. They have all different designs, with different voices and there were a lot of people that created stories with these characters but with music videos. They're basically anime characters that you could use, it didn't just open the ability to make music, it allowed people to create basically their own mini anime musicals without having to hire a lot of people. And people liked those stories. And just like how animes make some japanese musicians known to anjime fans though Openings, Endings and the OST. it made some people also notice how good their music is too. Kenshi Yonezu didn't use Vocaloids because he couldn't sing, he could, he just liked making music and stories with these characters. Sure, since Vocaloid porducers have a huge culture on sharing insturmental for everyone to use it open a lot of doors for people to cover their songs and there's definitely people that made that because it gave clicks without you having to produce music. But people also covered certain Vocaloid songs because Vocaloid songs, ignoring of the vocals or not, it's just good music, plain and simple. It's like fanartists, the re are definitely a lot of artists on the Internet that survive by drawing fanart of existing media instead of creating their own art. But some fanartists just draw Goku becuase they just love fucking Goku. I'm a person that likes the Vocaloid and don't mind the sound, but he main reason I like the Vocaloid world is because there are genuinely good music producers in there. Like Tony said, you don't make it big just because of the Vocaloids. Hell, there are people that don't even know that Kenshi was a Vocaloid producer back then.
Lixien
2024-11-12 20:13:22 +0000 UTCI went with the romanization of 'rugtrain' instead of 'lagtrain' because of the contents of the lyrics. The contents spoke of the rugtrain and had nothing to do with latency, which is why I looked up what a rugtrain was. The pronunciation of the word 'ラグ’ in the title sounds more like a truncated version of 'Ragu' (pasta sauce) if you roll the 'r' just once and use just enough breath to finish the consonant sound of the 'g' but don't fully pronounce the long 'u'. The rest of the title can be pronounced as the english word just fine because of the origin of the word is english anyways. My guess at the use for the katakana in the title instead of hirigana is due to the presence of the loan word 'train' or because it's a 'name'. otherwise it would look like 'らぐとるいん’. Language is fun.
Renalldo
2024-11-12 17:58:34 +0000 UTCWell dang, I'm gonna have to do some ear training. Sounds like it's time to start listening to some live music.
Renalldo
2024-11-12 17:43:33 +0000 UTCHey man, that's totally fair! I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me anyway though! Keep up the good work man 👍
Quinten
2024-11-12 17:33:50 +0000 UTCI didnt catch the connection of rhythm to the train tracks. That is cool. The start sounded like a train with the sfx but that makes sense. Bro... the voice is MASSIVELY saturated. Nobody singing in real life sounds like that. Our voices don't create tones SO evenly with that digital hum to it. Folks can sing beautifully and in tune IRL. The industry has just obsessed over delivering this style of sound. It "saves" people who can't normally sing and overwrites folks who can thus making everyone sound identical. It's just now how the biological sound of voice is. Nothing I Can do about it except comment about it.
DrumRollTony
2024-11-12 17:08:47 +0000 UTCNo, you are on the money. I DONT like the way it sounds. I don't like its role in music and I don't dig the position it has within the industry. There is a lot more context from me about the 8 min mark but I am exhausted of talking about this tbh because folks are SET in their thinking from a music CONSUMPTION standpoint and nothing I say is going to matter anyhow.
DrumRollTony
2024-11-12 17:04:35 +0000 UTCHmmmm interesting approach. I would personally never read something in English and fake an accent that I don't have. That can come off as weird and potentially viewed funky. If I was attempting to speak the title within Japanese context of language...that would be the correct time to replace those sounds. Since I am not there is no reason to do that.
DrumRollTony
2024-11-12 16:54:09 +0000 UTCBtw the english title is lagtrain. Japanese doesn't have L sound so it is replaced with an R.
I am Gamer
2024-11-12 15:33:10 +0000 UTCI think it's fine if you don't like vocaloid stuff (I don't like most of it either), but I don't think the argument you made at 8:00 made a lot of sense tho. First, it sounds like you put a lot of weight on the human element with the "erasure of the human voice" comment. Then when you adres the synthetic orchestra argument you seem to be more okay with it because "the samples sound like the actual instrument". I think these are somewhat contradictory statements. Since there is a clear difference between vocaloid and the human voice, i think there is a higher chance it wil instead be used as a DIFFERENT tool in the artist's toolbelt and not a REPLACEMENT so I don't think it is likely the human voice will be "erased". I think that is more likely with the synthetic instruments because it is closer to a replacement. I personally think most vocaloid stuff just does not sound very good, I sometimes get frustrated when the music underneath is really good, but it then immediately gets ruined because the vocaloid tuning sucks. Btw, if this came of as aggressive, just know that that was not my intention, I just wanted to point this out since it came to my mind when you said this. It's possible I just misunderstood you but I already wrote all of this so fuck it, sorry for the Wal of text bro tl,dr: It's totally OK if you don't like vocaloid, you are entitled to your opinion after al. I just don't think there is a way to say that vocaloid is bad (I know you did not say this, but you seemed to insinuate it), and justify it in any other way than to say "I just don't like the way it sounds"
Quinten
2024-11-12 10:49:18 +0000 UTCI didn't consider that commenting it was a vocaloid cover would/would not set a potential bias to your listening, but it makes sense. I DID though, refrain from pointing out that a lot of the tones/sounds are reminiscent of the sounds a train makes, to see if you'd pick up on that. Those 1/2 1/2s are the same-ish cant of train wheels hitting the gaps in the tracks. A lot of the other tones are all the variations of trains bells/whistles. You pointed out a couple. I particularly like the effect of the guitar strings at 3:00. When you listen to the original, or even this one again, give it that kind of consideration. I found interesting the bit you spoke of about the phrasing of lyrics and how vocaloids have the ability to ignore the breath metering. It's something I've had in mind when trying to sing along to certain songs or even just listening to them to imagine if it's a pre-recorded/mixed vocal track or if it can be done live and the difficulty of that. That didn't occur to me for this song, so it's something for me to listen to. I didn't think Okayu's voice was saturated in this song, but you have much better ears for it than I do, or I'm far too exposed to music with saturated voices.
Renalldo
2024-11-12 09:17:13 +0000 UTCIt would be nice if you could check out Ado's new song with Miku though! Me and alot of others think MitchieM's tuning of Miku is one of the best and I think both Miku and Ado's voice really blended well in the song!
elijah lew
2024-11-12 04:05:35 +0000 UTCYea yea. I have heard that many times. People think that the only way to get exposure is to have to hire some expensive vocalist and if you can't do that...ur just outta luck. 😅 📢musicians existed before vocaloid📢Cool that it worked out for people doing covers. Covering real vocalists is also an option but hey...numbers drive attention and internet clicks. I get it. The funny part is on all of that the vocaloid sound is still horrible. It's significantly worse than autotune. And... you have to ask yourself about Kenshi.... did he succeed because of synthetic voice OR his actual talent. Doing vc doesn't equal an in. You still need to be a muso in the end
DrumRollTony
2024-11-12 02:17:37 +0000 UTCINABAKUMORI is the only vocaloid i listen to, but even then about 70% of the songs i listen to covered versions of, they got some really great music but personally I just find it hard to listen to the originals.
Juno
2024-11-12 02:17:01 +0000 UTCI used to listen to a lot of vocaloid back in like 2009 - 2016. I believe a lot of its use back then was for people (broke and lonely HS and Uni students) who wanted to try composing/producing songs with vocals but didn't have the budget or time to look for a singer whose audio profile fit what the composer had in mind. You could just adjust the voice parameters to kinda fit the sound you're going for, and know that it will be consistent. This allowed people to just create and upload songs as a hobby to NicoNico or Youtube. It shined a light on many new composers/producers, like the very well known Yonezu Kenshi (formerly hachi). It also gave up-and-coming singers a huge chance to cover internet-popular vocaloid songs and upload them to attract their own audience like Eve, Ado, and Mafumafu.
Ryo
2024-11-12 01:16:35 +0000 UTCActually hilarious how much Tony talking about edited vocals and vocaloid sounds exactly like me talking about visual arts. Like people saying "but it looks pretty!" and I'm going "it's just a print of a painting! It's just AI! This one doesn't have any artist work put into it!" As an artist to me the most important thing I like seeing is actually human effort and skill, and the hand of the artist in it. The parallels with music is great
FullHeart
2024-11-12 01:01:14 +0000 UTCI'm sure there are people that have very saturated vocals in their covers because they can't actually sing on pitch but my take on the thing about people doing covers but still with very robotic vocals is that they still want that Vocaloid effect but with their voice instead. I'm saying this because there are people that do Voocaloid covers that go very robotic or natural depending on the song. There are also people that do Vocaloid covers but with a different Vocaloid voice or even their own (you can create your own Vocal Synth) I think in this case tho, since Vtubers or people that do this stuff usually hire a audio engineer to make the vocal mixing for them, so the vocals sounding more or less natural might depend on them and not on the actual person singing. I do Vocaloid covers as a hobby and sometimes I let someone else do my vocal mixing and they end up tuning my vocals way too much, but I can't tell them: ''um, so, can you actualy undo all your work and make me sound a little bit more natural? thanks'' (I mean, you can, but editing vocals takes some time and work so it's a bit rude to just ask them to undo the work and change it, they might not even know how to do it or there's even the possibility of you not being a good singer in the first place lmao), so some people that have some experience with Melodyne tune their vocals themselves before sending them to the mixer so things like this don't happen.
Lixien
2024-11-12 01:01:07 +0000 UTCJust mentioning this but it seems like this cover uses an commissioned instrumental of the original song instead of just using the instrumental that the Vocaloid producer provides in the YT description for you to use for free (as long as you dont profit from it ofc) which is usually what people that do Vocaloid covers use because they can't just afford to commission someone to make an original instrumental part and/or they're just doing it as a hobby. This is a huge Vtuber from a company, so they can (it allows them to put it on Spotify or things like that I believe since they're not using the original INST) So yeah, Idk if you did listen to the original already but you would probalby have a bit of a different experience since the instrumental is a bit different, not too much tho, the biggest difference is that the covers is in a different key. This is the original btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnIhRpIT7nc Also, for people that want to request Vocaloid covers, since the focus is usually the instruments it might be better to send one that actually uses the original instrumental so we're actually reacting to the song that the original producer made. If that's not a factor then I guess it doesnt matter, I'm just saying.
Lixien
2024-11-12 00:34:21 +0000 UTC
