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Review – Soniccouture Crowd Choir for Kontakt

A while ago James at Soniccouture contacted me about their new crowd-sourced sampling project called Crowd Choir. 1000 participants from all over the world contributed 4000 voice recordings to the project. The result is a 500MB sampled choir spanning 3 octaves. 1000 voices in 1000 different mics in 10000 different rooms. Pretty cool idea and it turned out very well. I don’t normally review sample libraries but I made an exception because it’s a unique idea, it’s useful, inexpensive and it’s for a charity.

Soniccouture Crowd Choir
Soniccouture Crowd Choir


Crowd Choir Space Options
Crowd Choir Space Options

For $25 (100% donated to the Starlight Foundation) you get a Kontakt/ESX24/Live format instrument built from 185 samples, 24-bit, 44.1kHz.

The custom GUI layout makes the instrument easy to use and tweak without having to dig through the endless menus and parameters of Kontakt. The scrolling Crowd Choir logo is a nice touch.

The sound is excellent and actually very flexible. It has a bit of a mellotron sort of quality to it, with just a few tweaks you can go from airy background vocals to filtered pads to massive monster growls.

The lowest notes have been stretched all the way to the bottom octave of the keyboard. This doesn’t sound very real but can make for some cool sound design sounds.

One of my favorite parts and the part that really makes Crowd Choir versatile is the Space Impulse Response options. These can dramatically change the tonality and depth of the sound. (see image on the right).

Here are a few samples I made to demonstrate some of the variety possible with Crowd Choir without any extra processing.

Big Choir

[audio:http://audiogeekzine.com/wp-content/uploads/crowd_choir/Big_Choir.mp3|titles=Big Choir]

Spacy Pad

[audio:http://audiogeekzine.com/wp-content/uploads/crowd_choir/Spacy_Pad.mp3|titles=Spacy Pad]

Monster Growl

[audio:http://audiogeekzine.com/wp-content/uploads/crowd_choir/Monster_Growl.mp3|titles=Monster Growl]

Crowd Choir is $25, find out more here.

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