Ueki-loid

Ueki-loid (植木ロイド / Uekiroido) is said to be an older male voicebank. The Ueki-loid is actually a Vocaloid of a famous deceased Japanese singer named Ueki Hitoshi (surname first), who died in 2007 and forms part of the "Legend of Vocaloid" line-up.

History
5 years before his unveiling, Yamaha was approached with the aim of creating a voicebank based on the voice of the late singer Ueki Hitoshi. Ueki-loid's production began in 2006. While work was beng made on the vocal voicebank library, work was neither confirmed or denied by both parties.

New technology allowed the phonemes to be extracted from recorded vocal tracks in order to create the Ueki-loid. A sample can be heard here.

Marketing
Despite that it has been declared he will never be released, an album will be released in the future to show off the technology behind the vocals. This is more about promoting the technology that made this possible than the vocal behind the songs.

Voicebank Library
Unreleased

The vocal itself overall has a Vocaloid engine quality to it. Since many of the phonetic data was impossible to retrieve since they were never recorded for Ueki Hitoshi in the first place, what you hear is mostly the Vocaloid engine between lyrics. Still, despite this, a lot of people were pleased with the voice and state it sounds similar to Ueki Hitoshi.

The voicebank was developed as follows: First, they made a voicebank from the voice of Hiro Kouichi (surname first), the eldest son of Ueki Hitoshi. Then, by a certain mathematical method, they constructed a transformation function which represents the difference of the voices of the two persons. Finally, they applied the function to the voicebank.

It is revealed that the Vocaloid is for private use only and will likely never be released at all.

Trivia

 * Since the original Vocaloid software had been released, it had been hoped that the voices of lost singers like Elvis could be brought back to sing again. Ueki-loid is the first step in that direction, although it has been noted it will be a while before they can attempt a English voicebank using the same techniques.
 * Some sources say he is the first private announced Vocaloid, however, this is not true. A Vocaloid-Flex voicebank was used in the game Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, also many private proto-type vocals also have been known to exist for Vocaloid with no indication any of them will ever be released. Even with this not taken into account, the first private vocal confirmed was Akikoroid-chan, who was revealed on September 6th, 2011, a few months prior to Ueki-loid's announcement.

Notable For...

 * First Vocaloid from the "Legend of Vocaloid" series
 * First male Vocaloid from the "Legend of Vocaloid" series
 * First Vocaloid to have the voice of a deceased singer