New musical project with Big-Al and Miriam

The idea of a new album first appeared during the recording process of "A Place In The Sun", an album utilizing Leon, Zero-G's voice library. In this new album we wanted to introduce Miriam, a female voice. This vocal library, based on the voice of Miriam Stockley, an English singer is probably the only English synthesized voice with acceptable intelligibility. The new album was conceived as an album of duets, which was the guideline for selecting and writing songs for it.

"Help Me Understand You" became the first song for a virtual duo. It was written by Alexei Ustinov in late 2006. In the beginning of 2007, three arrangements were made:

• Modern Boss Nova version by Anton Ilyashenko,
• Electronic pop version by Stanislav Torchenko,
• and Club version by Alexei Kosolapov.

However, the latest events in music industry encouraged us to make some adjustments to the project: Yamaha kept on working on Vocaloid, a new voice library was created by Zero-G, and 2 more new voices for Vocaloid were also introduced by a Swedish company PowerFX. MusikMesse 2007 in Frankfurt, Germany showcased these new voice libraries: Zero-G's Prima, an operatic female voice, and Big-Al and Sweet Ann by PowerFX, first being a low male voice and the second a female pop-singer.

By request from PowerFX CEO Bil Braynt, Alexei Ustinov has started testing Big-Al in January 2007, and has prepared a demo song in Russian, "Help Me Understand You" for the MusikMesse fair. The female part was initially performed by Miriam, and the male part by a new Swedish rock voice Big-Al. One should note that Big-Al’s timbre is dramatically different from that of Leon. While Leon is soft, lyrical and sort of "sophisticated", in spite of all the efforts to make him sound more "manly" and rough (which was necessary in some songs from the album "A Place in the Sun"), Big-Al was born "rough and harsh" and his Russian sounds rather amusing. Of course, there was little point in showing the English speaking audience a demo song in Russian, so the English language version (retitled "Is This Love?") was created (with the lyrics by Alexey Yakovlev) on the spot in Germany, on the first day of MusikMesse. So, the first song from the upcoming album was announced in Germany.

Hideki Kenmochi – Vocaloid Team Leader (Yamaha Corp.) Bil Braynt – PowerFX CEO and producer Alexei Ustinov – Director of Virartech Frankfurt Musik Messe. Yamaha Volcaloid2 show room.

The arrangement of "Help Me Understand You" is not yet finalized, but three initial versions are already available. For the sake of variety, Electronic Pop version retains Leon’s voice, while Big-Al is used in Boss Nova and Club edits. You can download full songs or their samples in mp3.

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