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Big Soniccouture sale at NI

Can anyone chime in on All Saints Chior Vs Spitfire EWC ? I have EWC so trying to ascertain if All Saints brings anything different to the table (as i’m a sucker for choirs lol )
Similar position, I have EWC and lots of others but the transitions in ASC don't sound acceptable to me (see below).

The choir is lovely - the legatos aren't bad considering what's out there. Here are the 1st 4 measures of O Magnum. Just a rough draft I threw together. Close mics on A syllable

View attachment O Magnum Mysterium - Morten Lauridsen (Take 1 Sample All Saints).mp3
I'd respectfully disagree. This sounds subpar compared to Dominus:



I've now gone through Threnody Strings, Celeste, Ondes, Canterbury Suitcase, Broken Wurli, All Saints Choir and All Saints Organ.
  • Threnody Strings is a bit shrill sometimes and seems rather limited compared to string libraries I own, but ought to pair well with Thrill and other aleatoric libraries. $30 loss.
  • All Saints Choir seems severely outdated and the legato is quirky for the male sections. Apparently the selling point was the space it was recorded in, and this doesn't really add much more than a good IR would have, imo. Hardly worth the $30 I allotted for it, but it's useable. No Loss. The retail price is a complete scam, imo.
Agree with your opinion on ASC, but respectfully disagree with Threnody. It's not meant as a traditional string library - it has no legato like Sunset Strings - but what it can do in terms of aleatoric and avant garde stuff is unparalleled, including Thrill, which I have and also love. Give it more time and you'll see! (P.S. I haven't found it shrill)

 
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Loving All Saints Choir so far!
I can understand the Dominus comparisons since they give off a similar churchy feel, but I'm liking the ASC vowels much more, they sound a lot fuller and detailed to me.

Best of all they're going to be perfect compliments to one another.
All Saints for vowels and Dominus for any syllables I may need :2thumbs:


Also it makes me wonder if Corey Pelizzari had any weird settings in his DAW or something to make All Saints so CPU heavy on his end.

I have all the mics loaded + Raum while fiddling with the crossfading nob and the highest I've seen the CPU go for me is 10% and I'm only on an i5 6-core.
 
Been playing with it nonstop, constantly messing with the settings and snapshots and wow..what a lovely choir.
The very little to no-vibrato makes it so heavenly for lush padding and can sound pretty cinematic too with the right settings.

One of my favorite purchases this year no doubt! :emoji_grin:
 
Here's my 2 cents for those on the fence: I'm completely agnostic when it comes to developers but have to admit that pretty much anything Soniccouture does sounds great out-of-the-box and I'm usually impressed by them. The instruments they sample tend to be more on the niche side, but if you're going for that type of instrument, then you will hardly find anything better on the market. In my case Soniccouture's libraries have replaced many mediocre libraries I regretfully bought from 8DIO in the past.

To back my claim, I've made a very quick demo comparing Soniccouture and 8DIO's hang drums. This was a live take with no post-processing whatsoever, not a single plugin, no MIDI CC, simply load the instrument, set the "fingered" articulation, press record and capture the MIDI. Then copy paste the MIDI into the other track. You might need to increase the volume a bit on your end as I didn't bump up the master fader on my DAW.

As you can hear, Soniccouture's hang drum simply sounds like the real thing, it has the right amount of resonance, the dynamics are just great and you can easily reproduce a live performance - it's as if you had a real hang drum on your lap (I have not edited the velocities post-capture). In contrast, 8DIO's hang drum sound quite... mediocre. It almost sounds like a synth emulation of a hang drum. On top of that, even though the volume faders are in the exact same position in both Cubase and Kontakt, 8DIO is so much quieter, yet the dynamics are pretty bad with very high jumps between the quieter notes and the ff ones that pop out every now and then. I've also had to restrict the note register I played for this performance: while both hang drums were getting a bit out of tune in the high frequency spectrum, the amount by which 8DIO's hang drum was out of tune was outside the range of what I deemed "musical".

I could easily repeat the exercice with Xtended Piano vs 8DIO Prepared Pianos, or the Grand Marimba/Vibraphone against 8DIO Studio Orchestral Percussion, you get the picture. So if like me you've previously bought relatively mediocre libraries and want to replace them with something far better sounding out-of-the-box, or if you don't have any and are not sure which ones to buy, do yourself a favour and jump on this deal (if you can afford it, it's worth every cent).

PS: if you're curious, I encourage you to check out the Youtube video called "Once Again" from "Hang Massive" from which I got the inspiration and compare the sound to the demos below.

EDIT: Here's the video so it's easier to cross-reference and just see how close to the real thing Soniccouture's hang drum is out-of-the-box (bearing in mind I've not added any reverb)


 

Attachments

  • 8DIO Alien Drum.mp3
    1.8 MB
  • SC Hang Drum MkII.mp3
    1.8 MB
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I used Threnody all over a suspense/horror score - it was perfect to create a sense of unease and dread. The X-Y control allows you to ramp things up for certain parts of the scene. The FX page has filters and I used a low pass to sit it in the mix. It’s so good that I’d rather you believe that other guy who said it wasn’t good, just so I can have it all to myself.
 
I used Threnody all over a suspense/horror score - it was perfect to create a sense of unease and dread. The X-Y control allows you to ramp things up for certain parts of the scene. The FX page has filters and I used a low pass to sit it in the mix. It’s so good that I’d rather you believe that other guy who said it wasn’t good, just so I can have it all to myself.
Well FWIW David, I strongly dissuade anyone from trying the Canterbury Rhodes too. I mean go ahead and buy this bundle for sure, but just don’t bother downloading that EP; save yourself some storage space and bandwidth. Noone really has a need for that sound I think.

;)
 
Been playing with it nonstop, constantly messing with the settings and snapshots and wow..what a lovely choir....One of my favorite purchases this year no doubt! :emoji_grin:
Well, if it has the Ambi seal of approval, that changes things! Hoping you or others will post some examples - mixed or compared with Dominus would be amazing - before the sale ends :)
 
Well FWIW David, I strongly dissuade anyone from trying the Canterbury Rhodes too. I mean go ahead and buy this bundle for sure, but just don’t bother downloading that EP; save yourself some storage space and bandwidth. Noone really has a need for that sound I think.

;)
OK I'm totally not looking at the CR page right now and I certainly won't buy it! :whistling:
 
OK I'm totally not looking at the CR page right now and I certainly won't buy it! :whistling:
Thanks for not buying. I’d appreciate it if you also did not look at all the Chris Watson stuff. His excellent field recordings as well as him being a choice sound designer for the BBC and a co-founder of a seminal Sheffield post-punk band does not mean that everyone should go out and buy sample libraries done by him.
 
Thanks for not buying. I’d appreciate it if you also did not look at all the Chris Watson stuff. His excellent field recordings as well as him being a choice sound designer for the BBC and a co-founder of a seminal Sheffield post-punk band does not mean that everyone should go out and buy sample libraries done by him.
OK cheers, I have quite a big 'To not Do' list! :)
 
Well, if it has the Ambi seal of approval, that changes things! Hoping you or others will post some examples - mixed or compared with Dominus would be amazing - before the sale ends :)
I might upload just a few vowel sustain chords to show the difference!
I think the difference is big enough so it will probably be more useful to hear rather than just tell about it.
 
Absolutely these are only first impressions. Choir libraries typically take some work and commitment to get good results, but the conundrum then becomes are you willing to dedicate your time to something that initially left a bad impression?

I say $87 loss, but then I thought about this for a while and I think a better choice of words is in order. It's $87 more than I would have liked to pay but will accept it in good graces knowing how good a developer Soniccouture is. One always hopes for a home run straight out of the gate, but given time I think I could warm up to most of what is contained in this bundle.
There are two issues here. If you get pissed off at a library because it leaves a bad impression on the first run-through, you are going to have to get used to a lot of buyer's remorse and stuff being left on the shelf.

To answer your question: yes I am going to spend time on something that left a bad impression because unless I had a rush of blood to the head and bought something that sounded bad in the demos I'm going to assume that the issue is that how I'm playing or programming the lines is more of an issue than the library until proven otherwise. Unless a library has incredible scripting or it's a percussion instrument, the chances are that it's going to be very sensitive to playing style. For stringed instruments that are a bit off the beaten track (for me at least), such as the nyckelharpas or the sheng, they aren't going to sound right unless played even remotely idiomatically. Play a monophonic melody from a MIDI keyboard with no other manipulation on the sheng: it's going to sound not even vaguely right.

I think the way that SC set up the scripting for the nyckelharpa and the oriental mouth organs isn't ideal for those instruments though somewhat friendlier than something out of EastWest Ra or Silk. OTOH, you do get more control over what comes out vs say the Tarilonte ERA version of the nyckelharpa, which does sound a bit more alive out of the box but suffers from being a bit too consistent on the keyclicks. The clicks I think are attached to specific notes, whereas on the SC they seem to be scripted and triggered separately. SC's issue is that they were a bit too enthusiastic in how many clicks you get in a passage - but the loudness is automatable (and on the ERA version as well IIRC). Net result: approaching the instrument idiomatically is going to net better results but does take time.

With respect to the choir, it did what I expected it to do and with decent results pretty quickly. But I was approaching it very much as something that will do detailed, fairly subdued vocal pads rather than something like an 8Dio choir library. I also don't trust polyphonic legato further than I can throw it on pretty much anything.

On the value element. I've got to say, this is nuts as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I've looked at a bundle deal like that and thought "well, this means each instrument is worth X and the bundle is only worth (n-z)X where z is the number of instruments I don't plan to use so now I'm losing money". As far as I'm concerned, the bundle is worth what I expect to get use from, which could be only a small fraction of the total. As long as that is less than buying those things separately, anything else that turns up in the bundle is just gravy, which at 85% off normal prices not a lot. Even if you're using to buying in SC's sales, it's still something like 40% off, which gives a reasonable margin of error. But I suppose the (n-z)X equation is how we end up with threads on what you *don't* use from Komplete Ultimate.
 
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