If any of you read my "How I Became A Weeb" blog post, you would know that I got into Vocaloid back in late 2012 when I first discovered Miku. From that point onward I pretty much stuck with basically three-ish vocal synth characters, and occasionally picked up a new song or two and got bored later. Honestly the thing that mainly kept me going for a while were the various Project Diva music videos and random fan art I saw. During these darker times (lol) the biggest change that happened was when I discovered Otomachi Una circa 2017, and attempted to binge-listen every song I could find with her. I tried real hard and for a day thought I succeeded at that, and later discovered that I barely got half the songs and just gave up. This seemingly random YT playlist of fave songs I have is the OceanGate Titan wreckage of that attempt.

I've always tried to seek out fan art of all the characters I loved, the most favourite of which was Yukari during this time. Circa 2019, somehow I managed to find a bunch of Japanese artists on Twitter who always drew and retweeted fan art of Yukari (and sometimes Una). I was into Yukari mainly because of her Vocaloid songs, but she was also a Voiceroid text-to-speech character, and many of these artists drew and shared pics with Yukari and other Voiceroid characters that I was not into. I was kind of annoyed seeing these "non-singing" characters, they kind of got in the way of the Yukarin art. That was a shame because I would end up loving many of them later.

These were still dark times, and I was kind of running on fumes with a relatively small playlist of Vocaloid songs I liked. But in 2021 I had two breakthroughs in this hobby of mine. I chatted with someone else into vocal synth stuff, and they introduced me to KAFU, who was then still just getting demo songs before her public release, and I was kind of blown away after hearing this song. What blew my mind was that this wasn't a "Vocaloid" character, KAFU was a character on a completely different piece of software (CeVIO AI) and was seemingly on a path to becoming a top vocal synth. I forgor to mention that up until this point I (oddly) had a sort of prejudice and distaste against non-Vocaloid characters (except for Sato Sasara sometimes), and KAFU completely wrecked that.

That was the first breakthrough, the second breakthrough was me discovering that the Voiceroid characters I saw before actually could sing thanks to fan-made mods to the Voiceroid software. The song that made me discover this was this cover of a popular Daft Punk song sung by Aoi & Kiritan & Akane. Which also led me to the GYARI meme songs that had these characters which I previously ignored in my YT recommends. And I fell in love with these characters' cute voices and their fan art. This total annihilation of my silly prejudice against non-Vocaloid characters was the kindling of inspiration for what would become my Singing Synthesizer pages.

Around this same time in 2021 I was looking for something interesting and unique to add to my Neocities site, which at that time was just a bunch of links to random stuff, plus some blog posts and stories. I was already sharing links to various things I thought was interesting, and I realized that it would be a great idea to also just share a bunch of links to the vocal synth songs I liked on a dedicated page. Eureka! This also gave me an opportunity to point out that "Vocaloid" and "vocal synth" are two completely different things by showing the specific singing synthesizer programs that were used to make the songs I shared.

Another great opportunity was me being able to infodump interesting facts related to the songs I shared. For example: why does the Kimagure Mercy music video look like that? Because the video producer animated it on 2s and 3s like it's an actual anime/cartoon. I could put that explanation right next to the link to the song with my dedicated song page. Finally, I chose to do something radical, something scandalous, I chose to make a Neocities page that was updated daily. This was the birth of Singing Synthesizers Daily.

At first SSD had kind of a weird green design based off of Miku's green colours, but I later changed it to the current Kocchi Muite Baby PDMV screencap and cool frosted black design. And I kept posting songs daily for some time. Despite the name, I actually had two breaks happen in SSD, one of which was almost a month long. I forget when exactly these were made, but I actually inspired Koinuko and Surenaga to make their own pages for sharing stuff with a similar design as SSD. I also inspired/motivated Clam Hanson to post Vocaloid songs weekly on her page, which was also cool to find out.

SSD eventually reached a kind of weird point where I basically exhausted all the songs (plus infodumps) I wanted to share from my old playlists, and it also was becoming too long a page. So I put an end to it... but I wanted to keep going. I was actually having a lot of fun listening to and sharing all this singing synthesizer music with my Neocities followers. So I started trying to seek out new songs with the new characters I discovered as best as I could. After scraping some stuff together I started a new page with a new design and a title that didn't pressure me to post so often: Singing Synthesizers Occasionally.

Even though I didn't have any pressure to post daily like I did with SSD, I still pushed myself to constantly seek out new songs, and SSO actually ended up being just as daily as SSD. With SSO I pretty much perfected my approach to finding new vocal synth songs, which I described in this blog post (although these days I basically only use YouTube search sorted by latest). With SSO I also had this weirdo who basically learned Japanese through eroges (holeinmyheart) completely voluntarily translate pretty much every song I put up on SSO with a very short turnaround time. I will forever remain grateful to holy-heart for all that amazing work even though I don't always listen to the songs for the lyrics. Holy-heart also suggested to me to add #anchor number tags to every song on SSD & SSO so they could be directly linked to on the page. Although neither he nor anyone else actually used those for anything.

During SSO's run I discovered Koharu Rikka, who is such a fun character. I also deepened my passion for KAFU and the Kotonoha Sisters. Unfortunately one of the songs on SSO that I really loved I almost lost because the creator (kotoba) decided to kind of wipe their internet presence. Thankfully I was at least able to find a YT Music version that kotoba left up, but I'm still really sad I can't watch that music video again until kotoba maybe puts it back up. This incident was part of what prompted me to create a YouTube playlist for all the songs on my singsynth pages, and use that with yt-dlp to download all the songs so I have a local backup (though I'm not consistent on keeping my backups up to date). Later on, other songs I shared ended up getting deleted, and I feel kind of weird maybe being the only person besides the creator who has a copy of those to share.

Unlike SSD, I didn't really exhaust a list of songs because my "list of songs" was basically a song queue of that I added to, removed from, and rearranged as I put songs on the page. I stopped SSO when I had the queue run dry and it reached a similar "too long" point as SSD. Though the queue got built up again, and during that time there was a new character with many new songs: Natsuki Karin (Koharu Rikka's senpai), so a new page was easy for me to start again. There weren't really any other nice words related to time posting frequency ending in -ly, so I just decided on a new weird page name: Singing Synthesizers Absolutely.

During the whole Singing Synthesizers Collection run, SSA was basically the peak Singing Synthesizers page. Though it was kind of a rough journey to get there. I originally started off normally, putting out new songs daily-ish, but I kind of let my standards slip and built up a huge queue and just dumped over 50 songs at once. This resulted in holy-heart short circuiting, and he stopped translating every song with a quick turnaround, and only translated stuff I specifically requested (all according to keikaku 🙃). But legit, I realized all those songs were bad and not up to my standards and taste, and I felt kind of weird just leaving them up and scrolling past them to get to the songs I liked. So for the first and only time, I pulled songs off of a singsynth page. Though I still left a list of those songs in case someone liked them.

Like previous pages SSA eventually reached an end, but problems started to emerge with my Singing Synthesizers page model. I created the next page, Singing Synthesizers Necessarily, and things started puttering along as before. Near the end of SSA, I didn't really post one song daily like I had previously, I just posted things in batches sometimes. I did the same with SSN. Also, this is kind of dumb, but people on Neocities didn't really seem that interested in my Singing Synthesizer pages much anymore (at least according to the like counts). The next issue was that I didn't really have much to infodump about in the description of every song like I did in the earlier singsynth pages. It was just "cool song" this, "cute song" that. Was kind of annoying to have to squeeze out some description for every song with a page design originally made for that purpose. The final problem with everything was that my personal life got busier than it was when I started posting songs on my Neocities site, and I was kind of getting bored of constantly updating with new songs.

So yeah, SSN was the final Singing Synthesizers page... of my old song page system... that I am calling "Singing Synthesizers Collection". If you browse these singsynth pages now, you'll see character icons next to every song. Those were actually not part of the original design, and were actually added after SSN concluded. When I added these I had ideas in mind for what a future, better singsynth page could look like if it were ever made, and one of those ideas was these character icons to help you see which character was singing, instead of just a name. So as a sort of final goodbye I added these character icons to all the singsynth pages. When I informed my Neocities followers that I made this change, des gave an excellent suggestion to create a pie chart of the frequency of each character. And so I tabulated everything for what is now basically the final visual summary of Singing Synthesizers Collection:

While the singsynth pages were on hiatus, I still continued to collect songs and thought about what the next singsynth page could be, and how I could solve the flaws of the previous system. And basically, this is what led me to creating Singing Synthesizers Infinitely, the new & improved singsynth page system of mine. Its got a way cooler system of showing which characters are singing, the design doesn't mandate that I have a long song description or one at all, and I don't need to think about which software a character is made with anymore. All this plus a new dense "masonry" design makes me kind of proud I managed to get all this together. Check it out if you haven't already.

Although I am kind of annoyed at how long I let Singing Synthesizers Collection run on with its subpar design, and kind of want to redesign all the singsynth pages to be more like Infinitely, I will leave the pages as-is so people can see how I did things previously. I'm glad I did all this though, I probably never would have gotten so deep into vocal synth stuff if I didn't have some self-imposed incentive to find new songs to share with people. Thanks for reading this far, that's pretty much all the lore.