Symphonic Choirs - Yay or Nay?

[WillRock]

Yeah, I'm looking into buying this: http://www.soundsonline.com/Symphonic-Choirs

It looks really cool, and based on what i've heard its a fantastic piece of kit to have in your arsenal of musiking.

However - I am seeing mixed results from people about it being buggy, hard to install, hard to use, blahblahblah. So I'm wondering if this thing is worth the investment or if I should leave it alone for now if its lacking in stability.

Any help you guys can give me is greatly appreciated

[dannthr]

Yeah, I'm looking into buying this: http://www.soundsonline.com/Symphonic-Choirs

It looks really cool, and based on what i've heard its a fantastic piece of kit to have in your arsenal of musiking.

However - I am seeing mixed results from people about it being buggy, hard to install, hard to use, blahblahblah. So I'm wondering if this thing is worth the investment or if I should leave it alone for now if its lacking in stability.

Any help you guys can give me is greatly appreciated

I have the old Kontakt version of Symphonic Choirs. It seems like improvements have been made to the Wordbuilder System, for ease of use, but the samples themselves are a bit long in the tooth.

I used to get work programming choirs for other composers--I worked on the Highlander game and Marvel Superhero Squad--but ever since libraries like Voxos, Requiem, Liberis, Mars, Venus, etc., there hasn't been as much a need such a specialist skill.

Wordbuilding may seem like a pretty cool concept, and it is definitely the holy grail of sampled choirs, but there are a few things to keep in mind:

1) With large scale choirs, it's very difficult to understand the actual words they're saying--you actually need a really tight and articulate choir like the kind Eric Whitacre works for his albums. So most of the time, with sampled choirs, you generally just need to give the impression of language.

2) Humans may not be experts at recognizing the articulation of orchestral instruments, but they are almost all of them experts at recognizing the articulations of human speech. This means that it is incredibly difficult to properly concatenate language. Consider one of the best language concatenation examples out there: Siri, and yet we can still recognize the inhumanness of it.

3) I haven't opened Symphonic Choirs in years.

[Moseph]

If you're into tinkering and detailed audio editing, you'll have a blast with the library. When you use the wordbuilder, you get a bunch of tiny soundclips that you do mini multitrack mixes of to get words. To get good results, you have to both be really patient/meticulous and have a very clear understanding of what a real choir sounds like -- experience singing in a choir helps a lot. I find I have to do a lot of manual blending of vowels to get decent diction. You have to keep in mind that in addition to being generally difficult for listeners to understand clearly, real choirs don't pronounce words the same way we do when we speak normally. A lot of the problems I've heard in other people's use of Symphonic Choirs come from them having the choir pronounce things in ways that would drive a choral director mad.

A lot of the complaints about Symphonic Choirs in the past focused on the fact that it used a MIDI plugin for the wordbuilder, which meant that people using DAWs without MIDI plugin support had to route the wordbuilder into their DAWs with a MIDI yoke/loopback setup. This has been changed (within the past couple years, I think), and the wordbuilder now runs in PLAY as part of the Symphonic Choirs instance, which makes setup much more straightforward.

And last time I checked, the demos on the product page were terrible. The library is capable of much better than that.

Edited December 1, 2013 by Moseph

[Argle]

I have it but I've only used it for ahs and ohs and stuff. Building words is extremely unfun. There's probably newer stuff out there that uses Kontakt and not a crappy proprietary player.

[ShrackAttack]

I have it but I've only used it for ahs and ohs and stuff. Building words is extremely unfun. There's probably newer stuff out there that uses Kontakt and not a crappy proprietary player.

My thoughts exactly. Had it for years and pretty much never used it. Part of this is my own fault, but it is just incredibly difficult to use well, especially in PLAY.