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Saturday, March 9, 2013

Song of the Week! 9 March 2013


The upcoming Sorairo Version introduces a brand-new genre for Vocaloid songs, and in addition, today is considered by synthesizer fans to be Miku day (March 9th, as '39' is pronounced 'Miku'). Therefore, today's featured song is from that new genre, a song which we saw just yesterday on the Taiko Team's UStream.

 Children Record (チルドレンレコード) Shizen no Teki-P feat. IA
Version
Allx3 (104)x6 (158) x6 (308)x9 (490)
 Taiko 0 S to 0 Y, Taiko 3DS 3
 105-210
 none
 iachil


After the brand new Namco Original song, Zero no Nocturne and the opening theme of Jojo's Bizarre Adventures' anime, the third Sorairo song played by Etou yesterday was one of the four new tunes for the new Vocaloid genre. With Children Record, Taiko recruits another virtual singer into its fold; and the first one using the Vocaloid 3 engine, named 'IA' (pronounced 'iya' and comes with her own title -ARIA ON THE PLANETS-). IA is made by a company named '1st PLACE', different from the traditional ones produced by Yamaha, Crypton and Internet Co..

Let's talk about IA first, as a character. Among the big family of virtual singers, IA is pretty much the dreamer of the crowd with distant looks, trying to become friends with everyone. Her voice banks came out on January 2012, six months after the release of Vocaloid 3. Her illustrator is Aka Akasaka (阿嘉赤坂) and unlike most of the other Vocaloids, IA does not have a favorite food or an age yet (these details will probably be added as more produces warm up to using IA)

Much like GUMI, IA's name is derived from her real-life voice provider, in this case it's Japanese singer Lia, who became popular in Japan for performing the opening themes of many visual novels - like Tori no Uta - and anime series (Angel Beats merits a mention here, since its OP has been in Taiko no Tatsujin for some years now!)

Composed by Shizen no Teki-P (also known as 'Jin'), Children Record is IA's first song on Taiko, as well as the first Vocaloid 3 song on it too. The actual song managed to achieve over a million views on Nicovideo and Youtube, and remained in the most popular Vocaloid song list for the most part of 2012. Children Record is part of composer Jin's own song series titled "The Kagerou Project", featuring songs from different Vocaloids.

Children Record's high speed plays a big role in the song's difficulty factor on Taiko games, supported by several clusters longer than 5 notes. However, the clusters and notes are well separated and have repetitive patterns from beginning to end (much like for the J-Pop song S and the ura mode of the Anime song Switch On!) so it's not a very stamina-focused song. Will this song gain an additional Ura mode like many other Vocaloid songs before it? Only time will tell...