History
TREi has come a long way since she was first released. Take a walk with me down memory lane.
Hello, I'm Evillivy and I'm the voice of TREi. I created her in 2012 when I was still in high school. Back then I went by Yoichi-Masaki and he/him pronouns. I started using utau on Deviantart and was very inspired by Kaisuki and Nekodoru's utaus. It started with Trei and Po, who is voiced by my wife. They were a packge set of CV banks based on the "Trap" concept. TREi was supposed to be a masculine woman, while Po was a feminine man. A big inspiration for them was the manga Ai Ore. They were released on October 29th, 2012
After seeing TREi and Po in action, my wife's brother wanted us to help him make an utau, so we added Sin-Ga to the group. We decided to make them genderless, and Chinese-American.
The Genderbends
The next step in our utau's journey was the creation of the Genderbends. We had always had an idea in mind for them, after doing many "draw your utau" memes, but we made them official a year or two after Sin-Ga came out. Initially they were just supposed to be new voicebanks for our utaus, but they quickly grew to have their own personalities.
KUOTA
Kuota's voice was recorded before the genderbends were made. We offered Reanfo's voice to an utau user that was asking for a few voices for their characters. We started working on the genderbends after she recorded for him, so we made POi a soft and raspy voice, while Kuota was vocally a genderbend of PO.
The utau user we worked with was...to put it nicely... extremely rude. He called the voice shitty, he kept trying to pitch the vocal files and threw a fit when we said to just use gender flags. We decided we no longer wanted to work with him. We took the voicebank that was recorded and named her Kuota, because she was going to fill in the voice quota of songs with alot of singers. She ended up growing into one of the most prominent utaus in our group.
The next stage
Bigger and Better Banks
For the longest time all of Team-Shizun were CV voicebanks. The idea of using VCV was daunting. It already took a long time to figure out how to use CV properly.
After some testing it was finally time. Team-Shizun needed to go VCV. After Everybody got their VCV update I started thinking about new ways to improve the banks. Power and Soft banks for everybody. New languages? The future was bright.
The Designs
Here are some of the designs for the next stages of Team-Shizun, as well as some early designs.
Here Comes English
From the very beginning TREi and Po were recorded with English in mind. Then I actually tried using utau, and the learning curve meant English took a backseat. Then something special happened, CZ released VCCV English. For the first time utau English was on par with, and often better than Vocaloid English. So I recorded one, and suddenly TREi was in English.
Then I thought, "why not do the impossible?" If CZ can make VCCV English, why can't I make VCV English? There were whispers of it online, and a few banks, but never a system that was released to the public.
So I did it. I used VCCV style phonemes, and I made a gigantic VCV English bank (VCVE XL). It was so big it broke utau's oto limit. It was a massive learning curve, but I had come up with so many techniques that I knew I could do even better.
Then Yin-P started working on CV-C, and I helped become a beta tester for the bank. It was small, with a focus on being multi-lingual. It worked with English and Japanese, with no annoying overlap. It was perfect. I used it as the basis for the new VCV English, VCV-E. It used modular parts, CV-C for CVVC style notes, Diphthong blending to remove a huge bulk of the VCV notes, optional CCV/VVC notes and C/C blends.
CV-C also made the new era of multipitch banks easier. We could record Japanese VCV and add CV-C for English. With help from other users TREi became a force in the English utau world.
The Break
With VCV-E Finished, and a new era of multipitch on the horizon, why did I quit utau?
There were many reasons.
WORK/LIFE BALANCE: I was enrolled in "The Art Institute" while I was working of VCVE XL. My school got sued for being a scam. I graduated with no job prospects and a mountain of debt ahead of me. I had always had a creeping fear that Utau was distracting me from getting better at art and 3D modeling. Now I had to learn how to 3D model on my own, and I couldn't have Utau distract me.
WORKLOAD: There had always been an uneven workload in Team-Shizun. I had been the sole person doing the majority of the art, making sure the banks get otoed, and making the covers. I got help with videos, but the workload was never spread properly. Once we got to English/Multipitch, it was hard to get recordings at all. TREi and REi both got finished, got screamo(Yeah, IK nobody DL'd REi, but if you did he has screamo too), and TREi even got VCV-E multipitch. Po only got a monopitch CV-C, and Kuota got monopitch VCV-E.
THE CREEP: Sen-Da and Sin-Ga got English, but their voicer admitted to being a pedofile. No hyperbole, attracted to 2-12 year olds, watched CP, and molested a child pedofile. He went from being my best friend and the only person at me and my wife's elopement, to being a stranger. It was an extremely turbulent time that changed so many things in my life. It's nothing compared the the IRL repercussions, but this affected Team-Shizun, and what the group even was now.
DRAMA: I had done a pretty good job of steering clear of drama, despite the community. I worked hard to help new users, build community, and provide resources to help make utau easier for everybody. I had a friend in the community who I had commissioned. I started to notice a pattern of behavior with them because their commission que never made progress, but they were always opening emergency commissions because they couldn't pay their bills. They were also regularly buying art commissions that were not cheap, based on me commissioning many of the same people. After a year and a half passed with little to no progress on my commission (which could have been finished in a weekend) I saw that somebody had payed them $60 for a commission. I reached out to other people in the que and none of their commissions had been done. With hindsight maybe I would have ignored this, but I felt like it was the right course of action at the time. I decided to make a post, warning people that if they commissioned her then they shouldn't expect their commission to be finished. I didn't expect everything to be smooth, but I was shocked by how quickly people lashed out at me because she was a more popular utau user. I had been helpful and kind to the community for 10 years, but if I wasn't popular then I was nothing. It was the last straw for me. The modeling and art communities were so welcoming, why was I spending my time here?
So I left
So...
Why did I come back?
Alot can change in 3 years. We had a pandemic, I got a new job, I've given up on ever entering the gaming field. I'm not the same person who left. Even when I was gone I loved looking up TREi to see if anybody used her. It struck me that people were still using here VCV art, since I hadn't made any updated art since them. I drew TREi ROSé based of the SynthV design elements. Then I heard Teto SynthV and something clicked. I wanted TREi to sound like that.
So I'm back. Kinda. I'm going to use utau on my terms now. Record a few new banks for TREi. Use her sporadically. And do what I want to do. I might focus on a webcomic, art challenges and tutorials, maybe even pick up 3D modelling again. Wherever the future takes me, I hope you stay along for the ride. If you ever need help feel free to reach out.
