# Hollywood Choirs - Demo Contest



## constaneum (Mar 4, 2018)

East West is holding a demo contest for Hollywoods Choirs. 

I signed up to take the opportunity to test out the choir. it's not that bad as what most people complaint. 

This isn't my contest submission but here goes a demo piece which features the Hollywood Choris (just the women patch)


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## kimarnesen (Mar 4, 2018)

constaneum said:


> East West is holding a demo contest for Hollywoods Choirs.
> 
> I signed up to take the opportunity to test out the choir. it's not that bad as what most people complaint.
> 
> This isn't my contest submission but here goes a demo piece which features the Hollywood Choris (just the women patch)




Beautiful choir and piece. May I ask what else you are using here?


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## constaneum (Mar 4, 2018)

Percussion from EWQL SO gold, SD2 and Forest Kingdom 2
Bohemian cello, orchestral essential strings and some free synth from Galaxy


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## SoundChris (Mar 4, 2018)

constaneum said:


> Percussion from EWQL SO gold, SD2 and Forest Kingdom 2
> Bohemian cello, orchestral essential strings and some free synth from Galaxy



You know that you have to use 100% EWQL products (so no third party plugins / instruments) for this contest do you?


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## rvb (Mar 4, 2018)

SoundChris said:


> You know that you have to use 100% EWQL products (so no third party plugins / instruments) for this contest do you?


Also no third party plugins? I thought only Eastwest instruments..


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## SoundChris (Mar 4, 2018)

rvb said:


> Also no third party plugins? I thought only Eastwest instruments..



Well thats what I wanted to say: Only EW instruments (maybe I didn´t say it correctly  )


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## rvb (Mar 4, 2018)

SoundChris said:


> Well thats what I wanted to say: Only EW instruments (maybe I didn´t say it correctly  )


Haha, okay thanks for clarifying. Otherwise I would've had to delete my submission.


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## constaneum (Mar 4, 2018)

This isn't the submission though.


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## constaneum (Mar 4, 2018)

But anyway, let's talk on the choirs. I personally find it not that bad as most people said but the amount of effort to make it sounds right (NOT perfect though) is really huge and I have to say rather time consuming if you're the perfectionist.

I also have the problem of getting T to sound T which turns out to sound like S instead. For example, To is pronounced as So which I don't get it at all.


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## SoundChris (Mar 5, 2018)

constaneum said:


> But anyway, let's talk on the choirs. I personally find it not that bad as most people said but the amount of effort to make it sounds right (NOT perfect though) is really huge and I have to say rather time consuming if you're the perfectionist.
> 
> I also have the problem of getting T to sound T which turns out to sound like S instead. For example, To is pronounced as So which I don't get it at all.



Hm well I think its a choir designed for the certain task: epic soundtracks and trailers. I am curious if you can make it sound soft. Right now I do doubt that would work but I will definitely give it a try. Ans yes: also the old symphonic choirs were very time consuming. But well - if the results are becoming good - so be it


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## pmcrockett (Mar 5, 2018)

constaneum said:


> But anyway, let's talk on the choirs. I personally find it not that bad as most people said but the amount of effort to make it sounds right (NOT perfect though) is really huge and I have to say rather time consuming if you're the perfectionist.
> 
> I also have the problem of getting T to sound T which turns out to sound like S instead. For example, To is pronounced as So which I don't get it at all.


I haven't used Hollywood Choirs yet although I may use the contest to give it a spin, but my experience with Symphonic Choirs is that you have to do a lot of vowel layering and use the consonants that sound right rather than the ones that look right. A lot of this is just due to the nuances of actual proper choral diction in the real world, where things just aren't pronounced the same way that you speak in conversation, but a lot of it is also just library oddness. You have to be both good at audio editing and very familiar with how a real choir ought to sound to get really good results from SC, and I imagine HC is probably similar. At very least HC should cut the amount of required fiddliness because there are only two sections you have to fine-tune the programming for rather than four and it EW's second crack at the idea.


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## JEPA (Mar 12, 2018)

i've downloaded the choirs for the competition. Is anybody having noise issues from ~ 6kHz to 10kHz?


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## pmcrockett (Mar 15, 2018)

constaneum said:


> I also have the problem of getting T to sound T which turns out to sound like S instead. For example, To is pronounced as So which I don't get it at all.


So having now played around with the library a bit, here's how to deal with the T sound at the beginning of words. You need to rapidly reduce the volume of the T (click the + sign by it in the time editor to bring up the volume automation lane). Try ducking it from 127 to 50 across 100 ms. The reason you need to do this is that HC gives you the possibility of infinite duration on all of the phonemes -- including things like initial T sounds -- so you sometimes need to modify the sound manually to make it shorter and more natural in cases like this one where the default doesn't reflect how words are actually constructed.

The process of building words that actually sound good isn't intuitive and you can rarely use the defaults. For example, the Votox (Latin mode) that I'm using for "it shall come to pass in the last days" is "iet S!C!aoel KoUm tUuo Paeos ien t!ao laa!est deEis." Most of the syllables have heavy time editor work done on them.


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## constaneum (Mar 15, 2018)

thanks for the tips !


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