Don’t stare into the Void… seek inspiration from a new Vista. Roland Schmidt unfolds the latest from the Bristol-based pioneers
It’s unusual for a Kontakt instrument to create a stir, but that’s exactly what Void and Vista managed through the release of its first Kontakt instrument, Strands. But with a new instrument in its library, we want to know how that ‘difficult second plugin’ measures up…
Void and Vista’s Folds focuses on the sound of the human voice. This translates as a considerable number of samples with the majority either presented as a form of raw acoustic vocal, or with some degree of relatively extreme treatment, captured at source. These samples form the basic building blocks and are categorised by menu. As we like to go down to the basic nuts and bolts, we began our sojourn through Folds by auditioning the raw content. These samples are very pure, captured beautifully in an up-close-and-personal setting.
There are no basic ‘oohs’ or ‘aahs’, instead the initial selection of 12 samples are accompanied by helpful descriptions, providing guidance about the oncoming sonic treat, but there’s no substitute for just listening. Every one of these samples evolves or changes through time, being coupled with a degree of round-robin or random triggering, induced by velocity or note selection.
The first sample ‘Weave’ saunters through a selection of vowels, with subtle variation of tuning that merely adds to the organic nature of the source material.
One of our absolute favourite samples has to be ‘Arhythmic’, which provides what can only be best described as a cross between Björk and the band Yello. This sample benefits from variation in pitch, as you descend the keyboard’s register.
Effective vocals
The next set of 12 samples are coupled by association. All of these samples exhibit treatment to some degree, from a new set of vocal samples, so you’ll hear ‘Taped’ which provides a degraded and stuttered form of vocal, or ‘Breath’ which provides a form of humanistic white noise.
There’s creative inspiration in the presets but the craving to scratch the patchbuilding itch is huge
‘Lull’ on the other hand, provides a thick vocal texture, separated by two octaves, with a textural and pitch-based behaviour that feels like a highly contemporary example of the ubiquitous Fairlight vocal sample – a technique which was uber fashionable in the pop music of the late 1980s.
The final sample menu provides synthetic bolstering, thanks to eight subtractive-style waveforms. There are five regular waves, which include a Supersaw, with the remaining three samples providing degrees of noise. The overall quality of a Kontakt instrument can often be informed by the purity of the initial sample content, and these samples are exemplary and hugely inspiring. This is before we’ve moved
