This month’s CM Classic samples take you on a journey around the globe with 380MB of worldly-wise ethnic waves. From the eerie rhythmic drone of the didgeridoo to the sublime rattle of the, er, fish, you’ll be hard pushed to get more authentic exotic sounds without flying halfway around the planet with a microphone and recording them yourself. Not only do you get the sounds themselves, but many of them come with DS-404 patches pre-programmed, so you can immediately reap the benefits of the audio without the hassle of making your own patches.
Mandy Edge
2020 24-bit vocal samples
Breaking from the norm this month, we’ve handed the sampling reins to Mandy Edge, vocal performer for Paradise (Turbulent Records), who has created 2020 24-bit vocal samples exclusively for cm readers.
The brief we offered was to form a ‘vocal toolkit’, and we reckon she’s done us proud. The samples are divided into four main areas, covering a collection of oohs and ahs, spoken word snippets, complete vocal lines, and, finally, a collection of odds and ends. By putting this extensive collection to work in your tracks, you’ll have Mandy’s vocal talents right at your mouse pointer.
Mandy used a Carillon 1.5GHz system with 768MB RAM, along with an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 soundcard. Cakewalk’s Sonar was used to record the collection, with a Joe Meek VC3 preamp and the Rode NT1 mic to capture her performances. The vocals were all recorded in mono at 24-bit/44100Hz with just a little compression from the Joe Meek preamp before being topped, tailed and normalised in Sonar.
“Firstly, I’d like to thank cm for giving me this opportunity to be involved in such a great project,” begins Mandy. “Computer Music has been our bible for the last seven years and is a cornerstone on which my career’s been built, so I’m really chuffed to be able to give you all what I hope is a useful set of samples.”
“So, where do you start with a vocal toolkit? I didn’t want to go down the usual ‘record a vocal at 120bpm, cut it up, you rearrange it’ approach, as it wouldn’t be a toolkit as such. With everything that today’s amazing pitch- and tempo-shifting software can do, I wanted to be able to give you a broad range of samples that you could really mess around with and comp up into your own creations.”
“For the vocal lines, I decided to try and arrange them based more around a genre/feeling than bpm. Each vocal was sung soft, medium and hard, with a harmony above and below, giving nine samples in total for each vocal line. In this way, I thought you could be really expressive with the dynamics throughout your songs.”
“For the inspiration for the vocal lines, I picked a genre-defining song and then sang my own melody line and lyrics over the top, so I could really get into the vibe of what I knew had already been a commercial success.”
“I also produced some 350 oohs and ahs, multisampled as above, and roughly 250 spoken words (in C) that would give a good palette to fit in with the vocal lines.”
“Overall, there are 2020 samples that I think are a really good start to Computer Music’s vision of a ‘vocal toolkit’ and I hope you have as much fun using them as I did making them!”
www. mandy-edge.co.uk