The Crow Hill Company releases Vaults - Wavering Choir

TCHC announces availability of VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR, bringing BEGUILING CELTIC TEXTURES to its line of free and accessible instruments

EDINBURGH, UK: music-making community tools-maker The Crow Hill Company is proud to announce availability of VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR — bringing BEGUILING CELTIC TEXTURES to its line of free and accessible instruments arising from company founder and composer Christian Henson effectively opening his ‘vaults’ for everyone to enjoy, this time anchored around a ‘hybrid’ choir of some of the finest classical, Celtic, and Gaelic singers recorded in the heart of Scotland, though to simply say this is beguiling would be an understatement since the folk-based captures involved in its creation (whereby each musician deliberately ignores the ensemble and performs a slow, eerie, and unsettling vibrato) cause vast fluctuations in pitch, making this the perfect pad to underscore anyone’s next big project — as of December 23…

The evocative and wavering tones to which VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR (partly) owes its name were originally recorded for a hit Apple TV show, though they never actually made it to the screen. “As composers, we tend to make a lot of sounds, whether it be via samples or through physical instruments, in order to best represent our voices as artists, but, unfortunately, a lot of sounds get lost in the sands of time.” So says The Crow Hill Company’s Theo Le Derf by way of further introductory background, before continuing: “In the case of this sound, Christian Henson and I were working on quite a prominent Apple TV production. We went quite sample mad in order to capture this unique sound world for this show, but, as with every project, some sounds are, inevitably, left on the cutting room floor. This choir is from one of those sessions, and it always stuck with me as having a really special, haunting sound, and we felt the need to share it with you all.”

So what is it, exactly, that ‘Christian & Co.’ felt so compelled to share, then? Theo Le Derf has this to say on the subject: “It’s a group of primarily Scottish singers, recorded with Clockworks Sessions at Assumption Studios in Glasgow. The Scottish singers have imbued the library with an inherently Celtic vibe, I think, and each singer was instructed to re-articulate their vowel sounds with a very wide vibrato, so this caused their pitch to waver.”

With that all being said, VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR looks superficially similar to its VAULTS siblings that preceded it. Indeed, its understated GUI (Graphical User Interface) appears — background colour change notwithstanding, obviously — almost identical, sharing the same, simple six-control setup with which users can quickly tweak its sound. This time, BALANCE and MOD dials are the easy-to-use order of the day, neatly positioned in a row alongside the usual ECHO and SPLOSH, familiar from those VAULTS siblings. “It’s just our standard VAULTS GUI in a fresh blue colour,” confirms Theo Le Derf, duly expanding thus: “The first big dial is TIMBRE, which is a custom-made dynamic filter, automatically assigned to MIDI CC1, so you can get quite fine control of the dynamics of the choir; our second big dial is DISTANCE, which allows you to blend the closer spot mic signal with the Decca Tree, which is a microphone array above the choir, so it’s capturing more of the room space. Then the smaller dials offer more concentrated effects, the first one being BALANCE — allows you to blend or isolate the lower register section of the choir and the higher register section, and you can blend them quite seamlessly by assigning it to the mod wheel; MOD is a very wild frequency modulator, which adds a lot of movement to the sound; ECHO is a really nice stereo tape delay — it kind of ping-pongs between left and right, which gives a real sense of space and more ambience, if you so desire; SPLOSH is just our standard VAULTS reverb, and you can control the signal chain by clicking on the associated arrow, so reverb into delay or delay into reverb.”

Having had first-hand experience of the sounds involved in its creation, Theo Le Derf surely speaks for all at The Crow Hill Company with his heartfelt closing words: “I really hope you enjoy VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR; I think it’s absolutely stunning, and quite close to my heart.”

Free for those who treasure sound, TV’s loss is clearly the music-making community’s gain as VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR is now available for all to download.

VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR is free for everyone — as are all VAULTS releases from The Crow Hill Company — from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/vaults/

VAULTS - WAVERING CHOIR installation and activation requires installation of The Crow Hill App — an easy-to-use app designed by the best in the business to provide seamless download, installation, integration, calibration, and organisation of The Crow Hill Company tools — available for free from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/crow-hill-app/

It is worth noting that each VAULT release will not be available to add to an account forever, however, since once a new VAULT is ‘opened’ and goes live, another one is ‘closed’ and no longer available, meaning only six such instruments are available at any given time on The Crow Hill Company website. What this means for those who have already added a VAULT release to their account is that it is there forever and accessible through The Crow Hill App. As such, loyal fans can add a brand-new instrument to their arsenal every month, collecting and keeping them all. As each VAULT release will only be live for around six months, it is worth making sure that it is added to an account while it is live in order to have forever access.

Access an ever-growing collection of free, professional tools and resources by simply signing up to become a Crow Hill member here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/join-crow-hill/









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