Advice on using wordbuilder?

[mickomoo]

I don't know if I posted this earlier, but I got EWQL's wordbuilder working. I don't intend to make it a prominent staple in my musical arsenal, but I do intend to use it occasionally. Does anyone have tips on getting the best out of it?

[Moseph]

Learn how a choir pronounces words. Singers deliberately use different vowel sounds than what are commonly used in everyday speech -- in particular, they avoid things that resemble the schwa sound (ə) -- because it's generally agreed that doing this produces both a more pleasant sound and more easily understood words.

For example, the phrase "I will have a pencil" in common speaking diction may sound something like "Aye whil hav uh pensul," whereas with singing diction it may sound more like "Aahy weel haahf aah pehnsihl."

Singing diction is a complicated subject; if you've sung in a choir it will definitely come more naturally to you. But even if you're not interested in getting into diction in great depth, it will at least help to be aware that you may need to do kind of unintuitive things with the vowels in wordbuilder in order to get it to sound like a trained choir. You can't necessarily just use the default vowels it gives you and expect it to sound good.

[Meteo Xavier]

This is probably my best opportunity to ask - how do you even open Wordbuilder? I have EWQL Choirs, but I haven't found where Wordbuilder is yet and I've not been able to play with it.

[dannthr]

Most of the time, singers sing the vowels, consonants must be constantly tamed in their length and transitions through to the vowels.

Learn VOTOX--know it like you know the alphabet.

Feel free to contact me directly with questions--Programming Symphonic Choirs is how I got started in the game industry.

The best word-building I've ever done was NOT using Wordbuilder, but using a massive custom template with every phoneme and constructing my words manually in MIDI.

The most important thing: When you get 50 people to sing together, you can't understand them. Use that to your advantage.

[mickomoo]

@Moseph & dannthr: Thanks

This is probably my best opportunity to ask - how do you even open Wordbuilder? I have EWQL Choirs, but I haven't found where Wordbuilder is yet and I've not been able to play with it.

The recommended setup at least in standalone is to find the application and have it open simultaneously with the symphonic choirs (while having one of the WB multi patches running). What I did (which for some reason wasn't openly recommended or suggested) was just open symphonic choirs, load a wb patch, then select wordbuilder (it's one of 3 buttons atop the choir engine). That makes it really easy if you're running it in a DAW.