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X Japan's hide Releases 'Last Song' With Vocaloid, 16 Years After Passing Away
posted on by Egan Loo
Musician hide, the band X Japan's guitarist who passed away in May 1998, will release a new song in December. The song uses Yamaha's Vocaloid voice synthesis technology to recreate his singing voice, based on lyrics he wrote and a demo he recorded just before he passed away.
It took about two years to complete this song to commemorate what would have been hide's 50th birthday on December 13. His "final new song" will be on an album that Universal Music will debut on December 10.
The title of the song is "Co Gal," and hide wrote both the lyrics and music. As the name indicates, the song satirizes the "kogal" fashion boom of high school girls and others who dressed with mini-skirts and loose socks around 1998. The Sports Nippon newspaper reports that a source who previewed the rock number, which clocks in at over three minutes long, said that "it is unmistakably his voice."
This will be the first never-before-released track from hide since "Junk Story," which was on the best-of album hide Singles in 2007. The musician had planned to include "Co Gal" on Ja, Zoo, his first solo album (after X Japan's breakup) that debuted posthumously in November 1998. However, since he passed away right before recording the song, all that remained were the lyrics and the audio demo. Part of the lyrics were displayed in the hide Museum in Kanagawa Prefecture's Yokosuka City from 2000 to 2005.
To create the song, the team extracted samples of hide's singing voice from his previously released tracks and "carefully" synthesized them with Vocaloid technology. INA, a 49-year-old musician and a close friend of hide, arranged the resulting voice with breathing sounds and other cues to give the finished song a realistic sound.
The upcoming album will include "Tell Me," "Pink Spider" and other hit songs in addition to "Co Gal." Hiroshi Matsumoto, hide's younger brother and manager, said that he would not have imagined that they can finally complete hide's solo album Ja, Zoo as planned. He added that to do so, on what would have been hide's 50th birthday, is like a dream.
Source: Sports Nippon
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