Big Fish Audio Vintage Vocals $200

Big Fish Audio offer a huge range of loop and instrument packs covering the full gamut of styles. This month we’ve got their Vintage Vocals Kontakt library, that focuses on conveying the sound of 60s and 70s female backing vocalists – specifically, those featured on funk, soul and R&B records.

Vintage Vocals, which is also available as part of Big Fish’s Vintage Bundle, takes recordings from three singers and provides them as a series instruments featuring long and short articulations (sustains and staccatos) alongside a range of vocal swells. Each of the singers – Angela, Janice and Tiffany – get their own instrument with the same vocal range and a similar set of key-switch notes. This makes layering of the three very easy, although pre-fabricated unison and chord patches are also available for quick inclusion in tracks. The overall style is intentionally loose, with velocity switching and round robin sampling intended to provide further variation. Depending on your point of view, this looseness might go a bit too far, as there are some points where tuning verges on being somewhat ‘relaxed’. There were also some minor noise artefacts noticeable on a few samples. The Kontakt instruments themselves provide basic tweaking alongside decent IR reverb patches.

This is a characterful, though somewhat niche, collection. For the price it would’ve been great to see some more elaborately scripted legato patches and a wider range of articulations.

www.bigfishaudio.com

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