The Crow Hill Company releases Dulcet Vocal

The Crow Hill Company delivers DULCET VOCAL as iconic, ethereal addition to free VAULTS Virtual Instrument collection, centred around Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s dulcet tone

The Crow Hill Company is proud to deliver …DULCET VOCAL as an iconic, ethereal addition to its free VAULTS… VI (Virtual Instrument) collection — creatively centred around the dulcet tone of the Edinburgh-based enterprise’s very own Dot Allison, an award-nominated Scottish singer-songwriter and composer, duly demonstrating her ability to captivate an audience by simply singing a vowel sound — as of November 19…

Although acting as a smaller sibling to The Crow Hill Company’s DOT ALLISON - DULCET VOICE ‘full-blown’ library in effect, VAULTS - DULCET VOCAL actually adds some effects to expand the sonic palette of anyone adding this rare voice to their creative work. As an award-nominated Scottish singer-songwriter and composer, Dot Allison’s work spans the ambient textures of trip-hop to the organic warmth of folk, first gaining recognition as the vocalist and co-writer of the band One Dove, whose Morning Dove White debut album of 1993 became a cult classic in the era’s electronic underground. Here, her breathy, almost translucent, vocal tone floated above dub rhythms, garnering her instant recognition within the electronic music scene. She subsequently launched her solo career in 1999 with the album Afterglow, which blended downtempo beats with lush orchestration and lyrical melancholy. More recently, 2021’s Heart-Shaped Scars saw Dot Allison stripping the instrumentation down to allow her vocal and lyricism to carry the songs, imbuing that album with a haunting vulnerability.

Outside of her solo work, she has collaborated with American composer, engineer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and studio owner Anton Newcombe — visionary founder and driving force behind Brian Jonestown Massacre, one of the most compelling bands in modern music — to compose the original soundtrack to the TV series Annika, including its arresting opening theme song, while her voice has been featured in a multitude of films and needle-drop TV — the use of a pre-existing song in a TV show to create a powerful, memorable scene or emotional impact, in other words — or in scores through The Crow Hill Company’s in-demand DOT ALLISON - DULCET VOICE library. Creative collaborations with electronic-, neo-psychedelia-, shoegaze-, and trip hop-genre-straddling Death In Vegas; British trip-hop collective Massive Attack; British singer-songwriter and musician Paul Weller; and American-British singer-songwriter and record producer Scott Walker have helped Dot Allison’s voice to remain her defining instrument, permeating all of her projects with a celestial beauty.

And a celestial beauty patently permeates throughout the sound of VAULTS - DULCET VOCAL. Thankfully, The Crow Hill Company’s Theo Le Derf is on hand to dive in. “It’s our VAULTS… GUI, this time in a fresh, mossy green colour,” he begins, before continuing: “The first of the large dials is TIMBRE, which is automatically assigned to MIDI CC1; it’s a dynamic filter, which allows you to change tonal quality and volume of the sound. The second large dial is SCATTER, which allows you to blend in short, fragmented vocal flurries and unmeasured tremolos performed by Dot herself. The small dials are more concentrated effects, the first being REPEAT, which slices, repeats, and reverses the vocal performance; this is tempo-synced to your DAW, so whatever BPM you’re in, it will follow that. MOD is a frequency shifter-based modulation effect, which adds a lot of width and depth to your sound. ECHO is a beautiful stereo ping-pong delay, which adds dimension to the sound. And SPLOSH is our signature lush reverb, which we use for all the VAULTS… releases.”

Resurfacing musically refreshed from his guided tour, Theo Le Derf draws things to an appropriate close, clearly impressed: “It’s an honour to be able to access Dot Allison’s voice so readily in this free library, and I’ll be sure to use it in future compositions. Your support of this platform really helps us out so much, and you can look forward to more exciting VAULTS… releases — just like this one — in the near future.”

VAULTS… releases from The Crow Hill Company — including …DULCET VOCAL — are free for all to download and make music with for the rest of their lives from here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/vaults/

Watch Theo Le Derf’s illuminating introductory walkthrough video for VAULTS - DULCET VOCAL here:

VAULTS - DULCET VOCAL 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/

Although anyone adding a VAULTS… release to their account (https://thecrowhillcompany.com/my-account/) for free can make music with it for the rest of their lives, only six such releases are available to download at any given time — the oldest being ‘rested’ whenever a new monthly release is added. All is not lost for those who may have missed the boat, so-to-speak, since those VAULTS… taken out of rotation periodically reappear as donation-ware, with six rested releases already available as VAULTS ARCHIVE N°01 (https://thecrowhillcompany.com/vaults-archive-no01/) for a small donation to Love Music (https://lovemusic.org.uk), a Scottish dynamic music inclusion and education charity that strives to increase its participants’ confidence, musical skills, and well-being through an exciting range of open-access projects designed to remove all barriers to participation and increase diversity in music-making.

For more in-depth information, please visit the dedicated VAULTS - DULCET VOCAL webpage here: https://thecrowhillcompany.com/dulcet-vocal/






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