I stumbled upon this thread and have a couple things to say. Since the beginning of virtual instruments there has been a ton of misinformation floating around about libraries. Remember all the guys that insisted GPO was so much better than EWQLSO? GG wasn’t even present at the GPO recordings. He bought bits and pieces from people. It was a con, but it worked for a while. Over a year. Then there was the Cinebrass 1 day recording that was so much better than Hollywood Brass until.... wait for it.... it wasn’t. The list goes on and on. Vienna started the whole legato thing and everyone just jumped on the band wagon and acted like they invented true legato. VSL didn’t get enough respect for what they did. From me either. I was too busy competing and I thought they had made a mistake with the sound.
Back to Hollywood Choirs
Sound- This might be the only choir library without any noise reduction. That makes a huge difference. We did some things equipment and money wise that goes way beyond what our competition has done with maybe one exception. Guys, most of the choir libraries don’t sound that great. Some do sound great. Sometimes it seems that some of you simply can’t hear the difference between a bad sounding library like that old Soundiron one that everyone loved and one of 8 Dio’s newer ones that sound good. I don’t know what to say about that. Some of this stuff has weird imaging, tons of noise reduction, tunnel sound, very little dynamics, vibrato that’s fighting itself, slow attacks etc.. That’s why I make a point about the sound. It’s an attempt to highlight a feature. It’s not used car talk. The best equipment available, great hall and singers and a great engineer with proper dynamics recorded pays off. If we use Shawn Murphy, guess what? It might be the best sounding..... Hollywood Choirs tries to do one thing better than everyone else. And that’s a hyper dynamic, word building, great sounding choir. It won’t sound great in every Acapella unless you really master WordBuilder, but in a piece of music it just works with no effort. And it has no equal in that respect.
Legato-wise this library is poor. We just did a couple quick things as an add on. But, in my experience, the word builder makes the library sound very real and connected. It lends a lot more realism than legato patches in most instances. Unless you just want a legato vowel sound, then there are much better options out there.
Staccato wise this library is poor. We chose not to focus on that at all. You can however use WordBuilder and play staccato and it sounds fine unless you want hyper aggressive and short stuff. Then your fkd.
If you dismiss the word building as a gimmick you are really missing out. Most choral music will greatly benefit from this feature. Because you have control over everything including dynamics and timing, wordbuilding is superior to prerecorded phrases or words. —- That is most of the time. If you base your composition off the feel and timing of a prerecorded phrase, it will probably sound great.
If you can only have one choir library, what do you choose?
The guy that started this thread is an a$$. Why? He accused us of buying reviews. F that guy. He smugly says we are lost in some time warp or some $hit. The internet is great until people with miniature John thomas’ Decide they are going to vomit over people that deserve a bit of respect. He didn’t quite get it. That’s fine. It will happen, but he should have spent the time that he took to make that disrespectful video on learning the product.
You can say whatever you want about me, but I have contributed a lot to the composer community. I love you guys and what we do. Do you think I needed to make this choir library. And share it? Nope. I wanted to complete my 20 year wordbuilding journey with something I could be proud of. Remember Voices Of The Apocalypse? Some of you speak like we are some kind of charlatans. It’s ridiculous. We made the most popular by a mile orchestral library ever - EWQLSO. People really liked and used this library for over a decade, some still use it. We made some of the most popular and deep ethnic products ever - Silk, Ra. We started the trend and made some great and hugely successful epic percussion libraries - SD 1-3. We made what was the best piano library at the time and is still great QL Pianos. Symphonic Choirs was massively successful and popular library in spite of its word building flaws. Virtual Instrument of the year for a reason. Also a trend setter. We made Hollywood Orchestra with the best talent out there including Sean Murphy and Thomas Bergersen. We spared no expense or effort, and in my opinion that library is the best complete orchestra there is to this day, along with Spitfire probably. We also made the best reverb for film composers there is - Spaces 2. You can’t dismiss all that when you talk about us. Thanks to everyone else who has been fair minded and reasonable.