World Suite: UVI captures the planet in a virtual instument

15 Dec 2016 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

UVI World Suite Er Hu · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

UVI World Suite Table Piano · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

UVI World Suite Australian Flute Phrases · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

UVI World Suite Vocal Ambience Traveler · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

UVI World Suite Brazil Traveler · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

UVI World Suite · Source: http://www.uvi.net/en/music-genres/world-suite.html

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UVI, masters of enormous sound library based virtual instruments, have sampled “thousands of years of musical culture from every major continent and ethnic tradition.” This is World Suite and it’s vast and extraordinary.

World Suite

It’s taken years to compile this library. It features over 50,000 samples of 375 instruments with 8000 loops and phrases. The intention is to let you browse the planet, seek out sounds from around the globe in one place. From tribal drums to mbira, koto strings to shakuhachi flutes, gamelan to bullroarer. It’s all here, at your fingertips – the sound of the planet.

World Suite splits itself up into geographical and ethnographical groups. These include the obvious Africa, Asia, Middle East but also less travelled groups like Occidental, Celtic, Spanish Gypsy and Australia. Recordings were done to capture both the physicality of the instrument and the playing style. Within the UVI interface there are custom controls depending on the instrument type. So you can adjust fret noise on stringed instruments and transients on percussion.

Loops and Phrases

Along with the playable instruments World Suite includes a huge library of loops and phrases. These are all performed and recorded to make them as authentic as possible. It can be difficult to replicate the playing of ethnic instruments when sequencing or using a regular western keyboard and so these loops give you an opportunity to pull in something more real. World Suite includes 9 “Traveler” instruments which is an interface into which you can load up to 6 loops and have them all sync’ed together, mixed and effected. There’s also two more dedicated to vocals. I get the feeling that you could get totally lost just listening to the performances.

It’s an amazing selection of sounds. Are you likely to use a whole lot of it? Probably not but what I like is that it will have a solution of any traditional feeling you want to bring to your music or sound design. Like the instruments, the different interfaces are beautiful are engaging. And it offers a great potential of discovery which could be a breath of fresh air in our oversaturated, synthesised lives.

UVI World Suite is available now for €299 and runs in the free UVI Workstation or Falcon for Windows or MacOS. It will chew up 30GB of disk space. More information on the UVI website.

https://youtu.be/iKt8Dl6Fsa0

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