(Image by ecapsule)

So, a Chinese company named “ecapsule” have released SONiKA in Chinese (Well, English SONiKA with a Chinese Dictionary and Chinese VOCALOID2 Editor), Mandarin to be specific. Hopefully some amazing Chinese producers (I’m looking at you Solpie) will invest in our little SONiKA, and make her beautiful songs.

_{Also, this was not written from NoNeed4Cosplay/NoNeed4Vocaloid, This was Written by Tyetyez (TYE on VO). I will be Looking after the Blog, seeing as NoNeed4Cosplay/NoNeed4Vocaloid has gone to collage. So all wish her luck. : )}

According to Zero-G site the latest male Vocaloid, Tonio, will be available for download and shipping on July 14th. The price is still $179 for downloadable version and $200 for boxed set version.

Still no word on when Tonio is to be release, but seeing this demo gives me hope that he will be available or purchase soon.

(Picture done by kazamori23 )

To celebrate Sonika’s birthday Zero-G has decided to launch another competition. In this contest you will make up a song that was made for Sonika.

Rules:

To enter the competition send us an mp3 of an original song that you made for Sonika.
The song can be sung by any Vocaloid or even by you.
The song can be acapella (ie with no instruments) or fully arranged.
It can be a whole song with verses and chorus or it could just be a short melody

Prizes:

Chances to win a copy of Sonika, Prima, or Tonio (Yes, that right yo have a chance to win the upcoming new male Engloid.
Plus adding on to that your song will be arranged and produced for Sonika by professional musicians.

For more info on the contest please click here

If you’re a fellow con-goer like me, no doubt you see Vocaloid cosplayers taking up most of your average convention. Well adding to the Vocaloid cosplaying craze QQCosplay has now made a custom Big Al costume ready for order at the price of 129 USD.

The costume design is the same as on his box-art and includes his jacket, belt, pants, and arm band(no awesome headphones unfortunately). As of now QQcosplay is the only cosplay site I have seen to sell a Engloid outfit. Hopefully they will sell more in the future.

(Picture taken from Piapro)

Kellplanet, a producer who has been recording in Toronto since 2002. Has recently release an album featuring Vocaloid Miriam, called Continua. Like most of Kellplant’s work, Continua features relaxing jazz music with minimal vocals.

At the moment the album is not ready for purchase, but you can listen to it a last.fm.

To see full ranking please go here.

(Picture done by Crossfrown)

I’m happy to announce that I was lucky enough to get an interview with Zero-G. Under the cut the company talks about the development of Sonika, plans for their older Vocaloids, as well as talk at bit about Tonio.

1.How did you and your company get involved with making Vocaloids?

We were approached by Yamaha. When they first decided to create Vocaloid they asked 3 or 4 companies to make voices for it and Crypton and ourselves were the only ones that actually went through the whole process to create end-products.

2. Would you mind telling me about the development of Vocaloid Sonika?

Prior to Sonika we’d really recorded quite serious professional artists. So for Sonika we decided to something quite frivolous. A young girl who could sing but was not a professional artist. We wanted her to have a freshness and innocence that you do’t get with a professional singer. We found someone who fitted the bill and recorded her over a number of months. Then it was the usual months of tedious programming before we ended up with finished product.

3. Anyone with with eyes can see that Zero-G has been getting more active with the Vocaloid fanbase. Please tell me your thoughts on what you think about the Vocaloid Fandom so far?

I think they are great. They are obviously passionate about their Vocaloid and I love people who have passion. They are very knowledgable but also very critical. We’ve been stung a few times!! But it’s good that they don’t hold back – we need to learn where we’ve gone wrong as well as what we have done well so we can get better and improve our Vocaloid products.

4.Zero-G seems to be putting a lot of effort into promoting Sonika. Do you and your company plan on doing the same for the Vocaloids you have produced in the past?

We have started selling the old Vocaloids Lola, Leon and Miriam online at http://www.zero-g.co.uk and there may be some new artwork for them in the future!

5.How do you feel about the negative feedback that was received from the Vocaloid community about Sonika’s new look?

There’s been some positive feedback as well, but we can understand that the Vocaloid community hold all the Vocaloids dear to them and feel that they own them in some respect so we expected some negative feedback. When we saw the new image by Mario we were so overwhelmed by how beautiful it was that we felt it had to be the new box art for Sonika. Besides the old box-art was never that popular.

6.Do you plan on changing the box-art of any of your other Vocaloids?

As I said before, we may do for the old Vocaloids but not for Prima. She will always be who she is and Tonio (the new male classical singer to be released in February) will have similar box-art to Prima as he is a kind of partner product to Prima.

7.There have been several complaints about Sonika’s English in the community. As such, a lot of people have been asking for a Act. 2/upgrade version of Sonika’s voice bank. Does the company plan on updating Sonika’s voice bank anytime soon?

That would be very difficult to implement unfortunately. There is no way to update the voice bank without completely re-doing the whole database which would take months and would then be very difficult to distribute.

8. Vocaloid Miriam’s voice was given to her by famous singer Miriam Stockley. In the future, do you plan on using more British artists voices to help create Zero-G’s Vocaloids?

We’d really like to create a Vocaloid of someone very famous. We have some names in mind but we’ll have to wait and find out if they are interested in collaborating with us. We’ll let you know first if we can pursuade them.

9. Speaking about voice actors, do you mind given us the names of the people who contribute their voices to help created the company’s earlier Vocaloids?

I’m sorry we are not allowed to contractually.

10.Do you have any Vocaloid news or plans in the future that you would like to discuss now?

As I mentioned before Vocaloid2 Tonio will be released in February. He is a male classical singer with a range from Baritone to Tenor. He has a lot of character and I think the Vocaloid community will be pleased with the clarity of his voice. But he’s not a typical Vocaloid voice – he’s a partner to Prima and he’ll be popular with Prima users who on the whole are more into classical music. After Tonio there will be another voice this year but we are still in discussions about who that will be. Also, we would love the Vocaloid community to give us their suggestions for voices they would like in the future, just email us at contact@sonika-vocaloid.com

Thank you for taken the time to doing this interview. I and I’m pretty sure most of the people who view this blog really appreciate it.

That’s okay. Thanks for your interest in our work!,

I’m both a huge Leon and Daft Punk fan, so imagine how happy I was when I came across this video while searching YT. This cover was done by BeginsWithTheEnd and this is his first attempt at using Vocaloids.

Matt9five,or as he would like to be known as Doofus-P, has done a wonderful English cover of Love is War with Vocaloid Sonika. What makes this cover truly amazing is how clear Sonika sounds singing it. Usually, Sonika sounds like she’s mumbling through most songs, which just goes to show you how skilled Doofus-P is when it comes to using Vocaloids.

I can’t do a this spotlight with of course not mentioning Giuseppe, the producer who does all the English Vocaloids demo. Here is a cover song of “If I was a Rich Man” from the musical Fiddler on the roof that Giuseppe did during Big Al’s release.

And now something to end this blog humorously a Engloid parody of Kannagi. Yes, Kjbioncle isn’t a producer, but she is kinda well known in the Vocaloid community for her Engloid fanart. In fact she was the winner for the recent Sonika competition.

The original song was done by Luka Megurine and produced by Toraboruta-P. This Big Al cover was produced by Sasasa-P.