1. I am viewing Vocaloid KAITO as an individual rather than a program in most circumstances. Hence, I will commonly refer KAITO as "him" rather than "it".
2. When I say KAITO, unless I specifically stated that I am referring to KAITO released in Vocaloid, I am always referring to KAITO released in Vocaloid3, which is the current one I am using.
I realized I had been composing songs for KAITO in his common tenor to baritone range. I feel that is his strongest voice range. I have very few songs where I used him to sing in high range, creating a gender-bend version of his voice. The two examples are SKIN and an unfinished last movement of a series of songs I did some time ago. To me, those songs were not enough to showcase the unique qualities of KAITO in high range. Therefore in these past few months, I decided to be more adventurous and explore all different voice range he can manage, even the ones in the greyed area.
Also, here is something interesting to point out. In the Vocaloid community, there are names that were tagged to gender-bend versions of a Vocaloid's voice. In the case of KAITO, his high range "female" voice is known as KAIKO. It is not an official name but a derivative of KAITO, and is an open source character.
After I bought the Vocaloid 3 Full editor (I used Vocaloid 3 Tiny that comes with KAITOV3 before that), I composed two acapella pieces for him. In these two pieces, I did not use any VST or musical instruments. It is all KAITO's voice. I was experimenting mostly with the length, gender and portamento setting.
By the way, he is singing in made up language.
Figure 1. Bird sound in greyed area of the voicebank.
Basically, it is a series of short notes with huge octave leaps. The words are just "Oh", but because it is in such a high pitch, it does not matter. Although if I use "Ta", there will be a kick at the front of the notes, making undesirable noises. The female voice is KAITO singing in lower gender setting, creating a less masculine personality.
The piece:
In Eversmile Whistle, I continued with my experiments on high pitch voice with KAITO's voicebank. This time, it is the effect resembling a person whistling. Also, while tuning the whistling part, I have also learnt that gender setting is an important element to create a more natural singing voice.
I have also attempted to make KAITO beatbox. It did not came out as I expected, but I enjoyed the new elements in the song. Especially in between 1:49 to 2:10, that glissando part was a new discovery. I drop the gender setting to the lowest with high portamento, so the voice became less recognisable and sounded more like a synthetic instrument.
The piece:
Through these two experiments, I found a huge variety of ways to tune KAITO. It proved to be a step forward in my Vocaloid tuning and I will utilize what I learnt into my future songs.
