Back in March, I started getting back into doing UTAU covers, and have tried to finish one cover within two weeks. I'm so far happy with the results, although it is taking up too much of my attention.
I've done this sort of experimental “metaprojects” in the past, where I try to put more effort into a specific subject. Last March I tried to get better at osu! which has so far turned out ok (I'm at least actually improving), and I tried to practice singing last year, releasing several covers with my own voice.
The singing experiment last year ended pretty much as a failure, with only six covers released overall (so it wasn't even frequent), and my voice never improved during that time. I realized that I need to practice my voice, and that I do not have an environment that I'm comfortable to practice in. I decided to put it aside for now (I can pick it up in the future with more effort, if I want), and focus somewhere else instead.
So starting with my cover of SHIRO in March, I started finding more songs to cover and trying out Yamine Renri's variants. While covering SHIRO, I tried to utilize Moresampler's flags (specifically Mt), which turned out pretty decent. With the next cover, This Earth, for You ft. Yamine Renri, I tried to put as much emotion into it as I can, utilizing Renri's variants and Moresampler's flags together, and I think it turned out alright. One big issue was my use of breath sounds — this cover was actually the first time I attached breath-in sounds to a cover, and I kind of screwed that up by making them too audible.
The thing is, the This Earth, for You cover was done within 2 weeks, a time I previously thought incredibly hard to achieve for an UTAU cover. My past covers always took somewhere between a month and close to a year, and I hadn't tried to, well, actually work on a project throughout an entire week. I had always worked on them for a few hours, and let them sit there for weeks. The covers I've done this year have all taken less than 2 weeks, yet to some degree good enough (to let me improve) for me.
So I think this UTAU covering experiment is successful so far. I still have plenty of things I want to learn, like actually composing my own songs and drawing, so putting all my efforts into releasing an UTAU cover every two weeks isn't the best choice for me, but so far I'm pretty happy with it.