Megurine Luka (VOCALOID2)


 * This is an article about the Megurine Luka software for the VOCALOID2 engine.

History
Planning began in early 2007, and was devised immediately after Yamaha announced their VOCALOID2 engine, and a bilingual vocal which was originally going to be called "Hatsune Miku". The reason for a bilingual Japanese and English vocal was to break the restrictions set by katakana-English, which was noted for its tendency to sound off. Luka's provider was selected from a list of several candidates.

The first recording of Luka's voice was in December 2007. According to later reports, originally while they were waiting for the recording process to start, both Yu and a woman from marketing began to sing "Happy Birthday" in the style of Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy. This made the five men in the recording booth break out in laughter. When they stopped laughing, Wataru Sasaki announced it was time to begin recording the English vocal. One of the words she was asked to record, being confirmed as "nerd" in various deliveries. According to Yu, due to the fact she needed to record in a single tone, she could not go out drinking the day before as it would make her voice bad.

Recording was resumed the following year in April. A further five sessions occurred, amounting 15/16 hours. The recording of the Japanese was noted to be constant, whereas with the English, the singer always sounded "angry" and everything took 4-5 times as much work, and English samples were cut at a length of more then 0.5 seconds. The experience with producing the Kagamine Rin \ Len Act2, helped resolve many issues with the English vocal.

Her introduction was firstly by code (CV03) and her existence was made known during the Kagamine original release promotions. She was intended to be the last of the CV series vocals. On the 5th of January the first letter of her surname was revealed with the promise of more information to come. On the 6th of January, Megurine Luka was revealed. Crypton advertised Luka's vocal database as "Japanese," like Kagamine Rin and Len's.

However, a second voicebank was shown shortly before her release that gave her the capability to sing in English. This was revealed on the 14th of November 2008. At the time of Luka's release there was a growing interest in English speaking VOCALOIDs. Luka offered both languages for the price of one, giving Japanese VOCALOID users the chance to test their skills with English capable VOCALOIDs. Her English voicebank was produced in a series of experimental recordings. Her vocal provider Yū was not used to the recording process, which ended up taking eight months.

Crypton Future Media chose Megurine Luka's name to express its hope that she would transcend borders and cultural barriers. Her surname literally means "sound that goes around." Luka was designed by the Japanese illustrator Kei, who had previously created the designs for Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Rin and Len. Demo .VSQ files for "UP" were made available for download from the Crypton Future Media blog as part of the promotion for her release.

Recommended

 * 2000 + more than Pentium4 2 GHz / Athlon XP
 * (Recommended 64 2800 + or more Pentium4 2.8 GHz / Athlon)
 * OS Windows XP (32bit) / VISTA (32bit) / 7 (32, 64bit)
 * Operation 32bit compatibility mode (WOW64) in 7 (64bit)
 * RAM memory 512MB or more
 * (Recommended 1GB or more)
 * Real-time VSTi is recommended when using more than 2GB
 * Interface VST2.3 (32bit) / ReWire / stand-alone

Voicebank Libraries
By default, her software will be set on its Japanese vocal and Producers will have to manually select her English one.

''Important: It became a popular myth among some groups of fans that Luka's Japanese vocal was more adept at commanding the English language than her actual English vocal. This, however, has often been proven incorrect as the Japanese vocal lacks much of the needed samples for producing suitable English. See English - Japanese for more details.''