A new free plugin from Native Instruments and Jacob Collier captures the sound of Collier’s audience choir in a software instrument. The audience choir is a regular feature of Collier’s live shows where the Grammy-winning artist invites his audience to participate in the performance of his songs, conducting them “polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds”.
Jacob Collier Audience Choir is built on recordings of 22 concerts in different cities around the world, from Adelaide to Zurich; as notes are played, you’ll be able to see which recordings you’re hearing on the plugin’s interface. The plugin offers four different vowel sounds (Aa, Mm, Oo, and Ee) which can be blended via the XY pad on the interface’s right-hand side.
The instrument also features a chord generator, so you’ll be able to play diatonic chords with single notes, and a slider for dynamics control. A timbre knob acts like a low-pass filter, and the onboard delay and reverb do exactly what you’d expect them to do, with five reverb types onboard. You've also got a control for stereo width, and you’ll be able to shape your envelope with dials for attack and release.
Jacob Collier: "I think that unless music is fundamentally simple, it doesn't really move anyone"
Open up a separate panel and you’ll find more advanced controls that allow you to automatically tune the chords you’re playing to the just intonation tuning system in real-time. “One of the most amazing things about audience choirs is that people often automatically tune to each other in just intonation, because the way the piano is tuned doesn’t usually apply to groups of singers en masse”, Collier says. “It’s kind of an amazing part of this plugin that it’s able to adapt as people would in real rooms to be very much in tune.”
In addition to the choir sounds, the plugin’s equipped with percussive sounds and a number of other samples of Collier’s audience shouting various words and phrases. The plugin supports polyphonic aftertouch, so you’ll be able to get expressive with MPE-compatible controllers like the Native Instruments Kontrol S MK3.
"I've spent the last few years touring around the world, playing shows in every corner of the globe [...] one of my favourite parts of the whole experience has been the ever-expanding evolution of the audience choir”, Collier says in the video embedded above.
"Over the course of this experience, one thing I was dreaming about was: what if I could sit in the comfort of my own home, and you could sit in the comfort of your own home, and experience the feeling of an audience choir at your fingertips? So I teamed up with the mighty Native Instruments gang and we put together this amazing instrument, built from real samples of real audiences the world over".
Download Jacob Collier Audience Choir now at Native Instruments’ website.
