Hard-wired to humanity, nothing gets to the heart of music like the human voice – and our most anticipated release to date is a choir that captures the breathtaking range of our most personal musical instrument. Crafted and conducted by Grammy winner Eric Whitacre and showcasing his elite family of singers, this encyclopaedia of the voice will enrich your compositions.
With these sounds at your fingertips, you will start to think differently about the human voice. Go beyond the choral cliches of sacred, angelic and apocalyptic, using these sounds to add depth, beauty, grit, emotion, or suspense. Recorded in the widescreen resonance of The Hall at AIR Studios, Eric Whitacre Choir shares the acoustic DNA of Spitfire’s orchestral range and is designed to complement and blend seamlessly with each of these libraries — all presented in our easy to use, award-winning dedicated plugin, including an Evo Grid for instant inspiration.
When the Spitfire Audio founders approached Eric with the idea of sampling his choir, Eric realised this was the perfect vehicle with which to free composers from preconceptions about the voice, and how it can be used in music. He found himself at home with the microscopic detail of sampling, reflecting his approach to composing, with which he crafts every thread of every sound with acute attention to detail.
Over weeks of recording, Eric conducted his choir for every sound in this Spitfire library, conjuring sounds that range from familiar vocal techniques, including vowels and open vocalisations whose harmonic content transforms with changes in mouth shape, through to more unusual articulations, including shorts and rhythmic passages.
The choir
Eric Whitacre Choir is one of our biggest libraries, filling 200GB of audio, and now NKS ready. We’ve taken a decade of sampling experience and applied this approach to give composers and producers a choral library that uses voices just like another section of your orchestra. In addition to a full orchestral set of samples, we have also recorded a stunning Evo Grid, with each element sculpted by Eric. With the help of design and user experience-agency ustwo (Monument Valley, DICE), Eric Whitacre Choir is housed in a bespoke, self-contained plug-in (VST2, VST3, AU, AAX), developed primarily for composers, by composers. A composition tool that’s easy to use, intuitive and inspiring.
There are 22 singers in total: six soprano, five alto, five tenor and six bass. In the Choir section you will find a total of 170 techniques, while the Evo Grid packs 111 Evolutions.
Where the choir meets Spitfire’s unique Evo Grid technology, a new instrument is born – one that so impressed Eric, he said, “Frankly, I wish I could compose like this in everyday life.” Simple in principle, inspiring in practice, the grid takes samples that change in different ways over time and arranges them across the keyboard. Play a single gesture or chord and it will weave a micro-composition that never stands still. Construct your own evolution, or hit the randomise button to automatically generate a unique instrument from an almost infinite array of possibilities. Always original, and always musical.
“The idea is that you can take up to three or four of these Evolutions and combine them,” says Eric, “or cycle through them as one of them evolves, and suddenly you’re painting music in a totally different way, sculpting sound in real time. You can create minutes of profoundly beautiful music in this way.”
Hall of magic
There was only one place we could capture the magic of this aesthetic. For Eric Whitacre Choir, we returned to Spitfire’s spiritual recording home: The Hall at AIR Studios – the scene of countless blockbuster film score recordings, and the majority of the Spitfire catalogue. “It was magical,” says Eric. “It must be my favourite recording room in the world. Something about the atmosphere in there, it’s absolutely perfect for voices. It’s got just the right amount of bloom, and the spiritual uplift of its original intention as a church.”
The choir has been captured via the most sought-after microphones, pristine preamps and legendary tape machines by world-renowned engineer Jake Jackson.
