Introduction
Bloom Vocal Aether is a playable instrument combining vocal loops, phrases and one shots and allows you to trigger, transform and rearrange phrases to add a unique emotional element to you music – all in time and in key with your project.
Excite Audio’s Bloom Vocal Aether is available now from Plugin Boutique in VST/AU/AAX formats, typically priced at £59 or rent to own at £4.99 a month for 12 months.
Note that a Lite version is also available, typically priced at £29. The difference between the two versions is shown below:
Overview
What I really like about Bloom Vocal Aether is that it sounds great, is easy to use and offers loads of creative potential. You control the effect using 3 pages – Performance page, Edit page and Samples page.
Performance Page
At the top of the screen you can access presets, there are 250 arranged into groups of basic, drones, experimental, harmony, lead phrases, melodic, pitched, rhythmic and textures. There are some excellent sounds and they give you a great idea of what Bloom Vocal Aether is capable of. You can also favourite and save your own presets. You also have access to the Edit page and output gain setting.
In the middle there are 4 macro controls – warmer (saturation and distortion); speaker emulator, doubler and ethereal (reverb and delay multi-effect).
At the bottom of the screen you can change key, access the samples page and the 2 octave keyboard triggers are displayed. These can be triggered by keyboard, midi or on screen. The white keys play samples and black keys are for effects – half time, double, reverse, down octave or up octave and there are also 5 sequence phases.
You can also randomise samples from the sample pool and you also have quick access to master effects.
Samples Page
There are 112 samples in 8 banks and to this page gives you the option to click and drag / drop to replace or rearrange the sample order.
Edit Page
This gives access to a huge range of controls where you can highly customise your sound. The sample is displayed at the top and you can see it being updated as it is triggered or you can turn this feature off.
Here you have access to playback options which can be forwards, reverse, ping pong or loop and you can set the sample to play as long as the key is pressed (hold) or latch to play the whole sample. You can playback at normal, double or half speed.
You can place markers on the grid to determine the start and end point of the sample and these can be snapped to grid or transients. You can also set the fade (crossover) value. You also have envelope settings with attack and release as well as pan, volume, pitch and formant controls. The choke group setting emulates features of certain drum machines. Choking is when one sample is triggered it cuts off what is playing to reduce overlap of samples.
The phrase player sequences sample playback and has multiple modes of operation similar to the sample player. It also allows you to draw curves for effects and when you turn them on will override the master effects.
Master effects can be turned on / off and reordered. There are reverb (hall, plate and spring) delay (stereo ping pong) modulation (chorus, vibrato, flanger) and each of these have more advanced settings that you can access.
Conclusions
Bloom Vocal Aether is an excellent effect that can be used for a wide range of genres. It doesn’t allow you to load your own samples but you can do so much with the included samples, effects and customisation options which means this isn’t really an issue. Additionally it also means that it is easier to use, ensures that you always get great sounds and saves you trawling through samples giving more time to be creative.
I’ve used Bloom Vocal Aether on the two tracks embedded at the top of this post. I started trying a few presets and because they sounded so good with the tracks I found that I didn’t need to modify them.
I’d say this exactly highlights why Bloom Vocal Aether is so good. It has high quality sounds in a huge number of presets and extensive customisation options to allow you to further define your sound if required.
