The sounds are very much geared towards atmospheric and percussive characteristics, with many weird and wonderful presets sounding more like synths than voices. Reassign Macro sliders to control almost anything Lit notes in Kontakt show you which notes are available for any given patch. Notes allow for chromatic playing on a MIDI keyboard, Loops play over and over and Slices spread the parts of a sound across several keys. There are three main categories of sounds. The main interface screen lets you choose from the 500 presets and these can be quickly filtered using tags like Cinematic, One-Shot, Pure and so on. Running in Kontakt, Exhale’s library uses around 9 GB of disk space, and this is made up of samples of real singers captured by top producers through analogue and vintage gear, tape machines, vocoders and more. It was born of feedback from musicians who complained that there was no way to get the kinds of vocal sounds and effects required by modern scores, EDM and sound design, in software form. It is quite possible to strip patches back to a more natural choral or vocal sound, but that’s not the real focus of what’s going on here. It’s hyper-modern, experimental and is more about using voices as instruments than anything else.
“Vocal Engine” is an accurate description, with real sampled voices providing the building blocks of sound, and a huge amount of other tools transforming the samples into new and often unrecognizable end products. Instead, a combination of sampling, synthesis and effects are used to create a completely new kind of instrument. What Output has done here is very decidedly not try to give you a soul diva vocal for your DAW. Samples are fine but limited by the words or sounds they contain, and purely synthesized speech often fails to capture the realism required. The biggest problem if you’re trying to create a “real” vocalist or a choir in software is that the human voice is so infinitely detailed and nuanced, not to mention versatile, that it’s practically impossible to do. Recreating voices in a virtual instrument has always been something of a hit-and-miss affair. Billed as a “Vocal Engine”, it’s not like anything you will have come across before. This philosophy is very much apparent in the latest member of the Output family, Exhale. They’re not meant to sound like anything else, and they don’t.
The underlying theme to the company’s products has been complex, futuristic sounds and atmospheres. Output has made a name for itself by developing some truly unique Kontakt-based virtual instruments like Rev, Signal and X-Loops.
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