Tonehammer Francesca
Kontakt
Reviews : Sample / Sound / Song Library
Tonehammer are building a strong reputation for beautifully recorded and inventive sample libraries, but Francesca, the first in their Forgotten Voices series, particularly caught my attention. Francesca Genco has a haunting alto voice, and this library showcases her vocal talents with over a thousand phrases, chants, textures, and vocal effects, with a total playing time of over 10 hours, and material arranged in 14 banks.
Starting with Gregorian-style chants, the library progresses through the breathy semi-whistling of the Flute Singing collection (a set of sometimes bizarre atonal and vocal effects), dark disturbing lullabies, several sets of more playful chants, forceful and somewhat atonal phrases sung forte, a small set of sung beats that you could also build into rhythmic accompaniments, two collections of dark, slow, and rather melancholy phrases with various quarter- and half-tone pitch-bends, and (finally!) a huge collection of whispered sounds, ranging from slow exhalations to short hissy beats.
There’s huge scope for experimentation, especially since the Kontakt programming allows you immediate control over the start point of each sample using the mod wheel, so you can pick out the portion you need, while the pitch-bend wheel is in charge of time-stretch, so you can tease out or shorten any syllable to make it fit your song. While such a library could eventually become quite recognisable, the additional ‘sculpting’ gives it far more flexibility than most.
Each sung note is typically offered in between two and five phrasings or performances, mapped to adjacent notes, and you get loads of such phrases mapped across three and five octaves of your musical keyboard. Francesca freely improvises between known Sanskrit verses, Buddhistic chants and her own improvisational language, so even when making free with the mod and pitch wheels, you’re still unlikely to inadvertently create any offensive words or phrases! However, you don’t necessarily get a phrase tuned to every chromatic note in an octave, which can make it confusing and frustrating if you’re attempting to find a selection of performances to fit the tuning of an existing track.
I found it far more productive to go with the flow and experiment using Francesca’s performances as the original inspiration and then add to that — and I suspect that Tonehammer’s MP3 demos were created using this approach. However, those who want to use traditional chord-playing techniques won’t be disappointed either, since another folder contains bonus vocal ambiences (Kontakt 3 only), which use various synthesis techniques to transform Francesca’s vocals into a wonderful set of haunting and breathy vocal choirs.
Overall, Francesca might require a little more effort than a traditional note-based vocal library, but the haunting alto voice and the phrase-sculpting features make this a unique, flexible and spiritual-sounding library that’s also superb value for money. Just listen to Tonehammer’s demos, and see if you fall in love as I did! Martin Walker
Time + Space +44 (0)1837 55200.
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Sun 12 Feb 2012
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985