Karoryfer has released Marie Ork, a free female death metal voice bank for the freeware Alter/Ego voice synthesizer by Plogue.
Marie Ork is a “first of its kind” voice bank, being the first death metal voice bank to hit the market. It was designed to work as a virtual vocal instrument for death metal music, as well as for creating monster sound effects. The voice bank is a rather compact 247 MB download, and it comes with 20 built-in factory presets which cover everything from classic death metal vocals to drones, vocal sound effects, and even some fresh vocoder-like sounds. It also features a really cool looking artwork, much like the original Bones voice bank for Alter/Ego.
The growling voice preset is the backbone of Marie Ork’s vocal repertoire, and it sounds admirably realistic most of the time. A fair bit of tweaking is definitely required to perfectly adjust the growl performance for a particular phase, although it sounds convincing enough out of the box most of the time. Other preset styles such as the vocoder and sound effects are there mostly for fun, but they can definitely sound great in certain musical contexts. The library supports the English language by default, but it can also be used for Japanese phrases.
I haven’t used vocal synthesizers much in the past, so I can’t really compare Marie Ork to other voice banks that are available on the market. However, as a casual vocal synth user who might want to use a death metal voice bank every once in a while, I give Marie Ork a big thumbs up.
The library is Karoryfer’s entry in this year’s KVR Developer Challenge. Karoryfer is run by our writer Drogomir Smolken, so consider giving him support in the voting stage of KVR DC. Also, don’t forget to vote for the Lagrange delay effect by Ursa DSP, which was also tested by our writer Bryan Lake.
Marie Ork is available for free download via KVR Audio (247 MB download size, ZIP archive, voice bank for Plogue Alter/Ego).
