 everyone this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. I am super excited to announce a brand new plugin by Native Instruments called Jacob Collier Audience Squire. This is an incredible concept where as you may know if you are a fan of Jacob Collier the six-time multi-grammy award-winning genius he is performed in a bunch of places across the globe and wherever he goes he has this audience choir thing going on where he gets the choir to sing specific notes and he magically controls the dynamics of each and every one of us. I myself along with my family ended up going for an incredible concert in Bangalore so you should definitely catch him play live at a city or a town near you because it's going to be a magical experience. So how it generally works is the choir he'll just get you to kind of sing together and he'll point and then you just sing and this is the result of that. So what the plugin does in its very basic sense is if you hit any note on your MIDI keyboard or keyboard which supports MIDI it's essentially going to trigger samples of these singers who are not even arguably not even professional singers they are just the audience members who attended that concert from different parts of the world. So if I play a C for instance this is being triggered by all these locations Medrid, Munich, Copenhagen so he's mixed all those concert locations of all the singers singing from there and you have this monstrous choir sound so it's not an actual choir a regular choir which gets sampled in a studio it's the audience who watches the concert and he does all of his arrangements his cover arrangements and his originals by getting people to sing and it's you have to watch Jacob Collier live you have to listen to all his songs his new album got released very recently so do check out Jesse Volume 4 we'll leave a link in the description. So first of all how to install the plugin how much does it cost me and so on and so forth you'd imagine that wow it's a Grammy award-winning artist who's put his stamp on a plugin which we can now control with our MIDI powered keyboard well believe it or not this entire plugin is absolutely free you can get it right now and to install it is it's really easy you just have to install the plugin from the Native Instruments website there's a link we've put in the description if you already own contact 7 well and good it just loads itself right into it with a simple download procedure using the native access application which allows you to install all of native instruments is software so you can install it either as a person who already owns contact 7 or other native instruments products and this gets embedded into that or else you can load it as a one-time user for free you just need an account there on their website and you're good to go so first things first the layout of the keyboard while you perform the plugin so to speak or record it if you observed in my intro performance I try to showcase most of the aspects but not all there's lot more so stay tuned so the first section of the keyboard somewhere from this G onwards all the way up are all choir samples so so you can play chords or you can just play single notes so these are tuned in the most natural or organic way because it all happened live during the Jacob Collier concerts now you can do chords major minor generally the plugin is recommended at least what I think when I fooled around with it play triads that's generally what works well major minor diminished sometimes augmented you can even do some spread voicing that works pretty well sus sounds beautiful so the chords at least which I observed when I watched him play live were these triads major minor suspended and maybe diminished here and there you know and dominance and all that don't sound so good so I wouldn't say that the plugin has limitations I would just say that this is generally what a choir would do you know in a in an ensemble so that's what you pretty much have at your fingertips on the keyboard so everything before C6 on the keyboard will be your single choir samples of multiple locations multiple genders or people of all ages singing the note G which is insanely cool that's probably thousands of people I would imagine and it goes all the way but once you start from C6 you get something very exciting that's what I truly love about this plugin you get these audience samples which are percussive in nature so with C6 you get a nice kind of kick which is probably the audience just stamping their feet on the ground of the concert hall there we go you have other percussion samples claps more another kick two claps some snaps in there in the reverb of that particular environment of course which you can control then you have some samples yeah no maybe ping-pong or something ping-pong that's what it says there so and then some silent samples there hopefully they add something there soon in the next version and then here at the very last part of your 88 key piano you'll have just simple chords triads all the major chords are here so all of these are naturally major chords but can make them minor very easily that's a very unique feature and all you have to do is go to the triad blend feature right click you can say learn midi automation and you can figure out what you want to move on your keyboard if you want if you have a knob you can move that I have an external midi controller called the cog nano control studio pretty much anything which has faders and rotary encoders should work pretty well so if you take that knob pretty much makes major into minor so in a nutshell the keyboard layout would be single notes percussion from C6 some sound effects okay and then some chords which can be assigned to get that major to minor transition which happens a lot in the concerts also okay so that's about four parts you could say for the for your keyboard so what's really important with the choir is what syllables come out of our voices when we sing in a choir that adds dynamics to the song it adds flavor and adds meaning to the song so a choir could generally go ah e and maybe is another syllable and believe it or not this app has it all and you can control all of them with just your mouse so if I play you an F major chord you can just take your mouse move this slider that's a full on R converts itself to an E rounded and this is my favorite so you can kind of go from R to really easy and you can program this on an XY controller you know they have a lot of options out there so you can program this or do it manually if you have to program it they have a lot of already existing presets which are really cool you just have to hit this play button of course you have to also play and choose one of the presets so I'm going to choose the preset let's see how that works okay so it just happens if you feel it's too fast for you maybe you can alter the playback speed here to half of that speed I tend to like this maybe change the preset a bit let's look at what bounce does looks like a bit random or if you would like you can do your own preset you can do user preset you can hit record you can hit record and just move your mouse to ours and m's which I tend to like and then hit play and it records your movement or your preferred vocal or vowel syllable preset adjust the playback speed faster even more faster you get the idea you can do all this to taste and it was so easy and this feature I don't think is there even in a lot of the paid choir plugins out there it's just very easy to use in a mix use in a production very easy to make these adjustments considering that it's a real choir doing these real things it's not synthesized right so let's look at other things to control with the choir it's not just the vowel syllables so first of all I've turned my timbre completely down this is how it was originally I've programmed it as always to one of the knobs here and the timbre appears to be a filter in this case a low pass filter allowing only certain frequencies to pass through and you can change the character you have low pass one low pass two which has a little bit of a resonance then you can go the other way around you have high pass start from something with only the highs and then move your way up you have high pass two a little bit of resonance in there and then you have something which I pretty I like a lot band pass okay and I think my favorite and maybe even your favorite will be the ferment timbre change which adds a lot more resonance to the filter okay let's try and take this back to normal now by going to either bypass or you can just go back to low pass one and move the knob accordingly choirs also need delays and reverb so you have very interesting delays which very cool names also which are very inspiring so if I turn the delay up it's assigned to this now a fader that's a time delay but it's also ping-ponging so it's moving in the stereo field and let's just try it a couple of presets this is your classic one I like the dark comeback it hits you back rather strong then ethereal it's a bit confusing you don't even you can't even make out the delay okay let's bring that back down and look at some reverb a huge place isn't it okay and again you have some beautiful presets for let's try out unusual plate maybe one more before we move on black hole who doesn't like a black hole and this is completely dry so that's the power of this plugin you can go well it's not fully dry because it's still the sample in that room but the effects are no longer there so I can bring only my reverb right this is the sound of the choir apparently in the black hole which I don't think will happen for a while for humanity then you have mono and stereo which is very important while mixing Jacob Collier is also an incredible producer and mix engineer which we don't speak much of so this feature makes the choir right next to you in mono and you enhance it you over enhance it with more stereo and this is a kind of a sweet spot which might work for me so you have that control as well and what's really cool is you have the attack and release as well so the time taken for the notes to come out or leave you will be longer or shorter based on the attack and release so ultimate control over your samples and it's free so a few more advanced features of the plugin first of all you have a chord generator mode so if I turn that on you get a kind of a pre-programmed chord system for the scale so for example if I choose F major you get all the major minor minor major major minor diminished and then F major and the other ones also kind of work tactically well see this is an F sharp diminished which resolves to G minor so if you are not the world's best piano player you can definitely rely on the chord generator choose your key and choose your scale you can also have a harmonic minor so this is really cool F minor G diminished probably going to get an A flat augmented now there we go so you're never going to go you're never going to go off the radar with your chords okay so sometimes with chords and voicing it'll be very difficult to invert it and get the correct voicing but here it already sounds good with the chord generator so do check that out if you need to and if you hit the gear icon you can go into the settings or generally the advanced areas and tuning there are so many kinds of tuning so you should definitely experiment and see what works for you best you have the pure tuning which which is apparently how humans will generally sing when they gang up together so if you take a major chord see it's slightly pitchy but it sounds very beautiful and this is the amount of the tuning okay then you can go into other Pythagorean tuning it's a bit more flatter just experimenting with the presets you can come back to dynamic pure tuning which is the default one which generally works really well okay you even have dynamic tuning with the natural seventh or without the natural seventh and the amount for the tuning and Jacob Collier is very much aware of all of the sense which exists within a semitone which is crazy so he knows when something is even 12 cents apart and he explains in a lot of his videos on how that feels to the human when we listen to it so there's a lot of tuning focus there's also some cool stuff as to how you want your pitch bend to work i've said it to be a full octave should always do that at one point in life when we produce music i'm sure uh pitch up and then you have the vowel mouth pad which i showed you you can assign it to an x y control and what's cool is if your keyboard unlike mine has after touch you can do monophonic after touch or you can do polyphonic after touch and basically when you play the keyboard harder certain things would be controlled like the timbre goes up changes the volume gets louder or the vowel syllable will change and you can even do polyphonic after touch that means every key can be have a different amount of after touch based on how much harder you hit the keyboard so the native instruments keyboards itself will support this plugin very well because the keyboards have polyphonic after touch and they have a visual representation of each range of the keyboard which i talked about in the beginning of the video and last but not least a feature in the plugin which i've not yet talked about save the best for last is the dynamics control using the mod wheel you can kind of even take a chord hold down the pedal and kind of automate this as you're producing and that's full on so vowel syllables can be automated with the x y control but you can also generally automate the original intensity of the choir having sung that at that particular event so that's F major very soft and then you can combine that with mmm and ours and all that and you get some serious live control or live power maybe you've already programmed this or you've already recorded it onto your door and this will work standalone you can have some fun working at standalone it would also work in your favorite door in this lesson we are using Reaper which is great for us it's our preferred DAW it can work in any software what you need is contact you need contact by native instruments you will see this in contact you can find it through the browser or through the in any which way you can search for it it will open up as an nki file which is a proprietary native instruments plugin format you could say right guys so don't forget to head over to the description the download links are available it's an incredible plugin and who knows what's going to come next so stay tuned to this channel we'll be reviewing a lot more gadgets a lot more hardware and software gear if you'd like us to do something do leave us a comment maybe there's something which interests you maybe there's something you're struggling to learn or something you're considering to purchase we can probably do a gear review video which is not officially a gear review channel but we definitely love our technology we love audio and we love bringing it all together with the music we have to offer cheers and catch you in the next one