FUNKYZUKIN's Blog

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Heyyyy, it's been a hot minute! I figured now would be a good time to finally do another Deep Dive, this time about my sleazy-pop lesbian anthem, GAL SHXXXT!

GAL SHXXXT began life as a Britney-inspired song with lesbian undertones written at the request of my friend Audrey (@funyariqa) who had mentioned on several occasions how the Vocaloid Yuri community was starving. When I finally began writing a song to feed them, the reception was positive:

Production began July 19th, 2025 at 9 PM, and unlike Sewerslidal Idol, the name and vibe came to me from the start, with me making a conscious decision to pull from 2000s Kumi Koda, Namie Amuro (who gets a shout-out in the lyrics), and Britney Spears (think Circus-era for the latter).

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Interestingly, this first WIP feels even more of a Circus copy than the final did, having a much more close-to-the-mic sound and way toned- down reverb. The sonic foundations were also much more "there" from the start, with the 4/4 triplet hi-hats already giving the song a sultry, sleazy lilt by this point. The bass, however, sounded gross.

The lyrics for this also flowed WAY easier than they did for Sewerslidal Idol, which was odd because I'm very much not a lesbian ?? Obviously you don't have to be a lesbian to write about lesbians as Toby Fox has shown, but for was waiting for the Alex SF6 DLC with lustful breath (before That Reveal) I sure was writing some pretty slick lyrics about lesbians. (they say if i put the word lesbian in here enough times i get a free pie!)

Oh yeah, I also made a really neat loop to go with the percussion that I don't think I've shared on its' own. I forgot to mention this in the Sewerslidal Idol post, but I made a loop for that of me shaking my pill bottle which I filled with tictacs, and that made me interested in making more odd loops to throw into my music.

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(Feel free to use this if you'd like, by the way!)

As for the vocals, I decided to use Gumi V3, a voicebank I hadn't used since October of the previous year. I figured her smoother pronunciation, breathier vocals and overall darker, more mature tone would make her a better fit for a Britney-esque song than Hatsune Miku would. I didn't have Vocaloid 6 yet, so I had to do this in Piapro Studio, which... kinda sucked for this song since Piapro is very much old software. I ended up going crazy in Vocalshifter for the tuning since that was just easier.

For the call-and-response vocals, I used several instances of NYL II in Synthesizer V2 (This was before they introduced the chorus feature, so I had to manually tune each instance)! Without the rest of the song to mix into, they sound kind of funny lol

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I don't think I have much else to say on the song apart from I was listening to Womanizer and Gimme More a lot while making this, and that the song was wrapped on August 7th, 2025 at 8:40 PM, somewhat less than a month after I started it. I forgot exactly what made me take so long on it compared to Sewerslidal Idol, but the video would be wrapped up VERY quickly in comparison.

I decided to opt for a much simpler, visualizer-inspired approach to the video, but I still wanted to make some nice art for it, and I knew I wanted to have Gumi all gyaru'd up in it, so I enlisted Audrey's help. I came up with a rough sketch for Gumi's design and handed it off to her basically telling her to go nuts and make something that was sexy to -her-, and I think in a just world we'd both be superstars in the community for this:

She also sent me a really hilariously strange Miku out of left field because I was working on a song about Miku being a lesbian introvert girlfail fujoshi/himejoshi at the time. I think the funniest thing is the cleavage video she's just. watching. like so real girl so real

ANYWAYS, at some point, I began working on the video art, opting for a binary style. I drew GUMI in parts to be animated in Moho (received on MASSIVE discount courtesy of Humble Bundle:

Yes, there is just a file called "boobs" sitting on one of my hard drives because of this.

Anyways, after I animated Gumi, assembling the rest of the video didn't take too long at all (partially because I made liberal use of stock footage and images), and the song was out August 14th, 2025!

At the time I'm writing this, it only has 435 views on YouTube, but it has seen slightly better success on streaming, with about 750 streams since its' digital release. Although the song hasn't had it's big break -yet-, I'm hopeful that one day, it will have an out-of-nowhere surge in popularity and it will get its flowers, the way it's spiritual successor Benny the Jester has... Which, at some point, I'm DEFINITELY doing a Deep Dive on that.

[blogzukin]

The first of my Deep Dives, and arguably WHY I wanted to make this blog in the first place! (TW: Mentions of suicidal themes)

I've been wanting to write about this one for some time!

So, Sewerslidal Idol is, as the name suggests, a song about an idol who wants to perhaps not be alive. If this song concept sounds familiar to you, it's because three months after I posted it, FLAVOR FOLEY came out with "Spoken For," a song that arguably does the concept way better (and given how much effort they put into their music and videos, was almost certainly in production before Sewerslidal Idol was even a thing).

*By the way, i LOOOVE Spoken For, go listen to it if you haven't!

Production on Sewerslidal Idol officially began on May 5th, 2025 at around 9:50 PM; when FL Studio prompted me to name my .flp and folder, I originally just called it "Depression pop"-- not that that was ever meant to be a final name, but I usually tend to give my files names that convey the vibe of a song before I actually name it.

However, by the first WIP render, I had already come up with the name "Sewerslidal Idol," poking fun at internet self-censorship, though this name led to at least one misunderstanding.

As gingerly implied by the YouTube description, the song was a way to express some stress I was feeling. I remember that by the time I initially started the song, my 23rd birthday was a few hours away, but I had mixed feelings. For one, the obvious passage of time, but also, I was really angry, because Donald Trump had been elected again, and between that, the various wars and genocides across the earth, the worsening of climate change, and feelings of guilt I had for being excited to go to a big convention that same month when suffering abounded, I had a lot of intrusive thoughts, usually to the tune of "If the world's so terrible, why bother trying? Why not just wither away?"

While I would get myself together not long after that, I decided to channel some of how I was feeling into a song, using the idea of Teto as an idol as a conduit. It made sense to me; being an idol is an INCREDIBLY taxing line of work unless you play every card right and get a support team that cares about you as a person, and given that Teto herself was facing an explosion of popularity, it made sense to use her as the face of this song, a thought process I'm sure also guided Spoken For.

Anyways, production of the song: Production began just a little after the 1-year anniversary of the 32ki song "Mesmerizer", which served as a major inspiration for the sound of the song. However, I actually tried to lean away from this sound with my first WIP:

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At this point, the sound was a LOT lighter sounding, and rather than the chiefly four-on-the-floor, happy hardcore-inspired drum pattern the final version had, this early version of the song instead had a more artcore/modern DNB inspired drum pattern. Even though the BPM's the same as the final, listening to this again threw me off as it sounded so much slower??

Also different was the entire chorus. I actually have very little recall of the chorus ever sounding like this, probably because it's just.. not very good. I do remember at the time I was concerned about making the song too dark, so the chorus instead is about Teto struggling with suicidal thoughts. I don't have the lyrics for this saved anymore, so I've tried to transcribe them. Emphasis on the word "Tried."

But I realized I didn't want to censor myself here, and at this point I had already written songs about slutty gay italian priests, a fortune telling prostitute who lets her married clients destroy their lives because they don't ever think things through, and literally the day before I started making this song, I had finished a song where the girlfriend of a mecha pilot has to completely reinvent herself and become his mecha's new pilot to fight the war, so like... I might as well trust my audience to understand that this was a song where Teto had made up her mind about ending her life w/o assuming I'm endorsing doing that. Thankfully, I have yet to see anyone interpret the song through a pro-suicide lens yet.

By May 9th, I had rendered my 3rd wip (very helpfully named "sewerslidalidol (wip1c).mp3" because i'm so good at naming conventions), and it's here that the song started resembling its final incarnation.

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I began leaning more into the Mesmerizer influence, but the overall sound was still pretty lightweight by this point. Oh, and I had completely redone the chorus, though I kept the very end of it because it was the only part from the original that felt "right." That weird "blehhh" I recorded before the chorus was still a part of the song.. for some reason. On May 12th, 12:18 AM, I completed the final render of the song. It was done.

So, what about the video? Production on that actually began not too long after I started writing the song, with the .VEG file for it having a creation date of May 6th, 2:58 AM thereabouts. (Which means, I actually started making the video just a few hours after I started making the song...

I knew pretty early on I wanted to do two things: One, have flashing lights. Two, have a warning for said flashing lights inspired by the warning screens of Dance Dance Revolution 5th Mix. Comparison below.

Oh yeah, fun fact: The NicoNico upload actually had this warning in Japanese. I'll share that too:

The video's general style was heavily inspired by the shows Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and Home Movies, which used the Squigglevision technique pioneered by Tom Snyder.

(Hey, when is there gonna be an indie cartoon based on this style???)

I also pulled inspiration from the old-school, maximalist Flash animations I grew up on; this is probably most obvious with the part where Teto just straight up does the Peanut Butter Jelly Time Dance. I actually made a joke out of this not long after I finished the song.

For some reason, I made the animations predominately in paint.net, which worked well for simple shots, but was actually, genuinely very terrible for when I decided it'd be soooooo smart to add a dance section. It might not have been so bad if I had made a proper storyboard. I completed exactly one board, and this is it.

An idea I had to make doing the dance easier was to create parts I could sort of collage onto each frame to save me time when I didn't necessarily have to completely redraw something for a pose. I don't think I ended up using it all that much.

In order to do the "dancing silhouettes" that accompany Teto in the chorus, I rendered just the dance as an AVI for reasons I forgot.. I think I thought if I did that, I could keep the pixelly look but it just... ended up being a 3 gb video that didn't look all that good. I still used it though.

During the prechorus, there's a detailed drawing of Teto with a gun in her mouth. I actually still have some of the art files for that handy, so you get to see how how that particular drawing progressed. Lucky you!

The 2nd verse is kind of where I lost steam, so I resorted to that weird Metropolis dance and repeating some stuff to get the whole thing finished. While it's not a choice I'd quickly repeat, at the very least, people seemed to enjoy the video. I think it actually became my first original to breach 1k views, which was pretty big news to me.

I think my crowning accomplishment with that song, however, was that it became the first song I made to be used in an edit-- specifically, a K-Pop Demon Hunters edit:

I finally watched this film back in December while visiting a relative, and honestly I'm surprised more people haven't done more stuff with this song and movie combo. Although, that might be because due to the name, it keeps getting drowned out by both "Your Idol" and Sewerslvt's stuff. I don't mind terribly, though, because 1k was still a big thing for me, and I ultimately had a MUCH more successful song down the line... But that's a Deep Dive for another time.

Lastly, I want everyone to know that rendering the video was a big pain in the ass. It was SUCH a big pain, in fact, that out of frustration, I named the video file this:

The official filename for the Sewerslidal Idol music video is "dont toy with me bitch.mp4", everybody.

[blogzukin]

TEST POST!! Don't delete my account im just busy setting everything up RAGH