Guides›Gospel
Using choir samples in a beat
How to place a choir so it lifts a beat instead of swallowing it, and what to do about the words.
Key takeaways
- A choir is the widest thing you will put in a beat. Filter it hard and it stops eating everything.
- Use it in gaps rather than throughout. A choir answering two beats beats a choir running the bar.
- Three ways to handle a religious lyric: use it, chop below the word, or pitch it into texture.
- Do not add reverb. Choir recordings already have a large room in them.
- If the choir is the hook, subtract everything else.
A choir is the widest thing you will put in a beat. Many voices, spread across the stereo field, covering most of the frequency range at once. Handled badly it eats everything. Handled well it is the most powerful single element available to you.
1.The space problem
One voice occupies a narrow band. Twenty voices occupy an enormous one, because every singer is slightly off in pitch and timing from every other, which is precisely what makes a choir sound like a choir.
That spread collides with almost everything else in a beat: the snare, the keys, the vocal you were planning to put on top. Three ways out.
- Filter hard. Roll the choir off below 200 Hz and often above 8 kHz. You lose nothing important, because the character lives in the middle, and you hand the bottom back to your drums and bass.
- Use it in gaps, not throughout. A choir answering the last two beats of a bar has huge impact. A choir running the whole bar leaves you nowhere to go and nothing to build to.
- Pick a register and stay there. If the choir is doing high sustained notes, keep your keys low. If it is doing low unison, keep your keys above it. Two elements in the same octave fight regardless of how good both are.
2.The words
Most gospel choir samples are singing something, and that something is usually explicitly religious. That is fine, and it is also a decision you are making on behalf of the record. Three options.
- Use it as it is. If the sentiment fits what you are making, it fits. Plenty of records do exactly this.
- Chop below the word. Cut so you are using a syllable rather than a phrase. A single held vowel carries all of the tone and none of the meaning, which is why so many producers end up with one-syllable choir stabs.
- Pitch it out of intelligibility. Shifted far enough up or down, a phrase becomes texture. You keep the human quality and lose the lyric.
3.Placement moves that work
- The answer. Beat one to two is your melody, beat three to four is the choir. Oldest device in the form and it never stops working.
- The lift into a chorus. Nothing under a verse, choir arrives at the chorus. The listener feels the section change before they consciously register it.
- The single stab. One chord, one hit, on the downbeat of a section. Used once it is an event. Used every bar it is wallpaper.
- Underneath everything, quietly. A choir at low level under a whole beat acts like a pad. You do not hear it as a choir, you hear the beat as warmer. Take it out and the track collapses.
Watch out
Do not add reverb first. Choir recordings already have a room in them, usually a large one. Adding more is the most common mistake here, and it is what makes a choir sound distant rather than powerful.
4.Processing
- Compress gently or not at all. The dynamics between a quiet passage and a full one are the drama. Flattening them removes the reason you used it.
- Consider mono. A choir collapsed to mono and placed centrally, slightly quieter, sits in a beat far more easily than a wide stereo one. You lose the spread and gain the focus.
- Automate the level rather than the EQ. If the choir is in the way during a verse, turn it down for the verse. Simpler and more musical than carving it up.
Tip
If the choir is the hook, build everything else around it and keep everything else out of its way. Drums sparse, bass low, no keys in the same register, no second melody. A choir as a hook needs room, and the only thing that gives it room is subtraction.
Choirs that were actually sung
Recorded in a room for these packs rather than lifted from records, which is why there is nothing to clear behind them. Stems on every sample so the voices come out on their own.
Producer, and the person behind Looplair and Soul Sample Club. Everything in the catalogue is written and recorded here.
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