Forgotten Voices: Barbary

Barbary Grant is a highly renowned Celtic vocalist and harper. She sings and articulates fluently in all three Goidelic languages: Scots Gaelic, Irish, and Manx. This homage won her first place in the sean nós competition at the 1998 Great American Irish Fair. Sean nós – “old style” in Irish – is a highly ornamented style of a cappella singing.

Forgotten Voices: Barbary is constructed from over 1450 different vocal phrases covering over 12 hours of recorded material. The majority of the phrases in the library are based on classic (public domain) songs from the Celtic, Gaelic, Irish, Scots, Welsh and Manx music folklore. Additionally the library contains a variety of more experimental phrases, including whisper songs, chantings, lullabies, elwish whispers and basic sustained notes.

As part of the Forgotten Voices Series, Barbary Solo Vocals follows programming and editing techniques that allow you to sculpt and morph phrases by adjusting the mod wheel and pitch bend. The mod wheel controls the sample starting point, so you can trigger offset anywhere you want in the phrases. The pitch bender allows you to time-stretch and compress the phrase. Special key switching also allows you to adjust to root pitch of all phrases in a patch by up to +/- 3 semitones. The combination between sample-offset control, root pitch control and time-stretch / compression allows users to seamlessly morph different phrases together, which brings endless possibilities for creating new phrases.

In addition Barbary contains a bonus set of vocal ambiences made by Steven Tavaglione (Instrumentalist and Sound Designer; Wall-E, American Beauty, CSI, Supernatural and 100s other movies/shows/games). Most core vocal phrase and ambient instrument patches are now also available in the EXS24 format, although time stretching and sample offset features are not supported. All demos are played live using one vocal ambience and one set of vocals per demo, so they literally took 3-5 minutes to compose.