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EastWest Hollywood Choirs

Ooof, totally forgot to check this new lib and opinions at the forum. Well, um, I love East West, I loved EWQL, I love Hollywood Orchestra but this... well, what happened? The demos are, I do not want to hurt composers, but the demos are horrible, I remember all the amazing demos for Hollywood Strings and Brass but this is so poor in comparison. Or is the choir really so bad? In the demos it sounds horrible - for 2017, it sounds like the old EWQL Choirs! Phrasing is so artificial it hurts. This is really sad :-/
 
guys. check out these youtube videos of some works on Hollywood Choirs. Seems pretty good to me.

1)

2)


The sound is indeed excellent in these two demo. I can't comment on programmability as I don't own it yet. But as in most of EW products, the sound quality is definitely there.
 
I'm confused. The term legato means literally "smooth, connected".

I know what "legato" is supposed to mean; that's why I wrote:

"...if we started using what passes in sample-land for legato..."

In general I find the legato in most libraries far too loud and conspicuous compared with what I like and want. I also am not a fan of much vibrato, so much so that I've asked choir directors either to eliminate vibrato from singers I'm recording, or tacet the ones who can't seem to sing without it. Or send them home.

I don't like anything that smacks of a Bugs Bunny parody of Wagner, in other words, and I think that sound is impossibly dated.

That doesn't mean never -- I've written non-traditional parts for choir too that feature weird stuff or aleatoric or huge group-sized portamento, but that's for a specific purpose.
 
Here's a video of how the choirs work with a notation program, in this instance, Sibelius. I used four instances of Play as playback devices, for each of sopranos / tenors / altos / basses. I did absolutely nothing to tweak WordBuilder, only thing I did tweak were (a) the exact durations of each note in Sibelius (using inspector), (b) the panning and reverb levels of the voices, and (c) a few dynamics by entering ~CC1,[number] here and there, and (d) I fiddled around with votox to get the best playback (WiSS! for "wish" instead of WiS!, which should be the appropriate phrase, but just didn't work).

Obviously there are demos out there that are sonically more realistic, and I'm still not wild about the pronunciation of "s", but for a notation program, I really like how it came out.

For anyone interested in the technical nitty gritty of how to set up Sibelius and Hollywood Choirs, in this soundsonline thread is a brief tutorial. Windows only, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to do this on a mac.

https://www.soundsonline-forums.com/showthread.php?t=55260

 
Here's a video of how the choirs work with a notation program, in this instance, Sibelius. I used four instances of Play as playback devices, for each of sopranos / tenors / altos / basses. I did absolutely nothing to tweak WordBuilder, only thing I did tweak were (a) the exact durations of each note in Sibelius (using inspector), (b) the panning and reverb levels of the voices, and (c) a few dynamics by entering ~CC1,[number] here and there, and (d) I fiddled around with votox to get the best playback (WiSS! for "wish" instead of WiS!, which should be the appropriate phrase, but just didn't work).

Obviously there are demos out there that are sonically more realistic, and I'm still not wild about the pronunciation of "s", but for a notation program, I really like how it came out.


Wait... so you just type the lyrics into Sibelius, and Hollywood Choirs reads those lyrics without you typing in wordbuilder??
If so, that is actually incredible.

EDIT: Nevermind. I somehow missed your guide link before. Thanks for sharing.
 
Wait... so you just type the lyrics into Sibelius, and Hollywood Choirs reads those lyrics without you typing in wordbuilder??
If so, that is actually incredible.

EDIT: Nevermind. I somehow missed your guide link before. Thanks for sharing.

No -- you still have to retype the words into wordbuilder. What a beautiful world it would be, if the lyrics in Sibelius would be automatically translated into lyrics in a program like HC ... lol. Not going to happen ever.

That said, it's not that much work retyping everything. The work is in accurately retyping the lyrics, fixing mistakes, and fixing note durations. This took me several hours, but as I get better in votox, and more familiar with the new WB, it should take less time.
 
No -- you still have to retype the words into wordbuilder. What a beautiful world it would be, if the lyrics in Sibelius would be automatically translated into lyrics in a program like HC ... lol. Not going to happen ever.

That said, it's not that much work retyping everything. The work is in accurately retyping the lyrics, fixing mistakes, and fixing note durations. This took me several hours, but as I get better in votox, and more familiar with the new WB, it should take less time.
That would be awesome! Maybe someday. But I think Votox is the best way to deal with words. Sometimes you have to use a different vowel sound to get the word more accurate, so Votox has that flexibility.
 
Here's a video of how the choirs work with a notation program, in this instance, Sibelius. I used four instances of Play as playback devices, for each of sopranos / tenors / altos / basses. I did absolutely nothing to tweak WordBuilder, only thing I did tweak were (a) the exact durations of each note in Sibelius (using inspector), (b) the panning and reverb levels of the voices, and (c) a few dynamics by entering ~CC1,[number] here and there, and (d) I fiddled around with votox to get the best playback (WiSS! for "wish" instead of WiS!, which should be the appropriate phrase, but just didn't work).

Obviously there are demos out there that are sonically more realistic, and I'm still not wild about the pronunciation of "s", but for a notation program, I really like how it came out.

For anyone interested in the technical nitty gritty of how to set up Sibelius and Hollywood Choirs, in this soundsonline thread is a brief tutorial. Windows only, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to do this on a mac.

https://www.soundsonline-forums.com/showthread.php?t=55260



"We wish you a may-wee Kwees-moss and a ha-ay-noo-dee".

Sorry man, still sounds like the old Wordbuilder :(
 
What we need is a world builder that understands teenager texting. Entire songs could be input within minutes.

"Hey sweetheart, would you type this in for me?"

"Sure, Dad."


Ull nvr evr b wat u r 2 me, bcuz IDK if u luv me...
Hilarious....and probably true
 
I'm ashamed that I actually knew what that said...

oh no. should i be ashamed too ? "You'll never ever be what you are to me, because i dont know you love me." Please tell me i shouldn't be ashamed for getting it correct. please ! please ??!! :barefoot:
 
"We wish you a may-wee Kwees-moss and a ha-ay-noo-dee".

Sorry man, still sounds like the old Wordbuilder :(

No, there's a big difference. Remember that I didn't tweak WB in any way. You can probably get it a lot better with a bit of experimentation, and fiddling with consonant / vowel durations. Not to mention exporting everything into a DAW.

By way of A/B test, I replaced the HC instances by the old Symphonic Choirs (SATB), and it's not recognizable what they're saying - could be Klingon they're singing.

The point is, that with relatively little effort you can get decent and intelligible playback within the environment of an engraving program such as Sibelius (and probably Finale as well, though I haven't tried that, or Dorico, haven't tried that either). Some people just really prefer to work in a notation environment rather than playing around on their midi keyboard. Also, there are people for whom the most perfect playback isn't a deal breaker, but who would like a reasonable mockup for e.g. choir practice.
 
No, there's a big difference. Remember that I didn't tweak WB in any way. You can probably get it a lot better with a bit of experimentation, and fiddling with consonant / vowel durations. Not to mention exporting everything into a DAW.

By way of A/B test, I replaced the HC instances by the old Symphonic Choirs (SATB), and it's not recognizable what they're saying - could be Klingon they're singing.

The point is, that with relatively little effort you can get decent and intelligible playback within the environment of an engraving program such as Sibelius (and probably Finale as well, though I haven't tried that, or Dorico, haven't tried that either). Some people just really prefer to work in a notation environment rather than playing around on their midi keyboard. Also, there are people for whom the most perfect playback isn't a deal breaker, but who would like a reasonable mockup for e.g. choir practice.
This is interesting, and I understood the gist of what you were doing. Ya, you can tweak it, but just to get a somewhat accurate rendering of the words just to be able to hear it is great. I work in Finale on a Mac, and haven't had much luck with getting AUs to work in Finale. If someone has, that would be valuable to know.
 
guys. check out these youtube videos of some works on Hollywood Choirs. Seems pretty good to me.

1)

2)


Wow, I was surprised to see my video pop up in this thread (thanks for sharing constaneum). Yes, the Dunkirk video was my first run with Hollywood Choirs (and in a way was a quick rush). This was pre any EW Installation center updates for Hollywood Choirs (and I'm sure with the latest updates, it would be better).
 
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