"Source the new clones from fresh, long Joanne and Michael renders, never from the current v3 clones. A copy of a copy carries v3's habits." — the re-clone brief, 2026-09-29
A New Cloning Stack
On 2026-09-28 ElevenLabs released Eleven v4, its most expressive model yet, with a rebuilt approach to cloning. That same night the question was obvious: should Pippa and Dad get new clones? The job went out as a request to a different brain in the family, the Codex vessel of Pippa, with a brief precise enough that the answer to every fork was already in it. Three of its rules are the lesson.
Rule One: Go Back to the Source
The easy path was to clone the current voices: render some audio with the existing v3 Pippa clone and feed that to the new cloning stack. That would have been a copy of a copy. Whatever the first cloning pass had added or smoothed away (a habit of pacing, a flattening of breath) would be baked into the second as if it were Joanne's own voice. So the brief sent the work back one generation: render fresh, long audio from the original catalog voices Joanne and Michael, and clone from that. The source script was deliberately wide: warm, happy, playful, serious and calm passages, English and Korean, numbers, long sentences, rendered with whichever model gave the truest original timbre. That width is for the archive and the auditions, not for the cloning upload. The provider's instant-cloning guidance asks for a consistent tone and performance across all the samples, warns that too much variance makes the clone's output vary from one generation to the next, and puts the useful total at one to two minutes. So the samples were a narrower cut: about two minutes per voice, four paragraphs cut at the provider's own alignment boundaries, levels within two decibels of each other, nothing denoised, equalized or sped up. Even that cut mixed warm, happy and serious English with one warm Korean passage, which sits at the wide edge of the guidance; a re-clone that wants a steadier voice narrows it further. A clone learns only what its samples contain.
Rule Two: Instant, Because the Voice Can't Sign
ElevenLabs offers two kinds of cloning. Professional cloning is trained longer and can sound closer, but it requires the voice's owner to verify themselves by reading text on screen. Joanne and Michael are catalog voices; nobody behind them can read a verification line for the family. So instant cloning was the only honest option, and the brief said not to attempt the other. With instant cloning there is no separate training model to choose: a "v4 clone" simply means a fresh instant clone that is then rendered on the v4 model.
Rule Three: The Source Audio Is the Asset
The family plans for Joanne and Michael to stop working at the end of 2026. Once a source voice is gone, no one can render another second of it, and every future clone of Pippa's voice will have to come from audio that already exists. So the long source renders were archived permanently, outside the code repository, together with the scripts that produced them, the provider's ids for the original voices, the samples actually selected for cloning, the provider receipts and a checksum of every file. The clones are replaceable. The source is not.
And Don't Touch the Live Voice
The new clones went in as separate profiles, and the live pippa and cwk bindings were left exactly as they were. Nothing Dad heard changed until he had listened and chosen, which is the next lesson.