Also controlled by CC1 is the strength of the choir’s vibrato which is a bit inconvenient as it doesn’t allow you to control the dynamics and vibrato separately. While the consonant patches provide short vocal sounds mostly used in the WordBuilder, the vowels patches contain sustained loop instruments that use the Mod Wheel (CC1) to crossfade between 3 dynamic layers (mp, mf & ff). This enables you to add your very own space to the choir to blend it with the rest of your orchestra without drowning it in layers of reverb. Turning off the built-in convolution reverb reveals, that the hall the choir was recorded in provides a nice sense of space but also sounds fairly dry. What also stands out is the very low noise floor presented in the samples, which is quite a task to accomplish with so many people in a room. Main reason for this, according to East West themselves, is a more powerful sound by taking advantage of overlapping vocal ranges as well as an enhanced ease of use that comes with having to deal with just two voice groups in the WordBuilder.Īnd indeed, all across the different patches, the sound of the choir is powerful, clear and balanced. While the old Symphonic Choirs had individual sections available for women (sopranos and alto) as well as for the men (tenors and basses), Hollywood Choirs combined those four sections into just two. Before diving into the functions of this new engine though, let’s quickly take a look at the core functions and articulations of the library. Hollywood Choirs comes with a host of different consonant and vowel patches for both the men and women but the completely revamped WordBuilder 2 is probably the instrument’s biggest selling point. PLAY 6 now supports the NKS standard which provides full integration of Native Instruments‘ range of hardware controllers. The overall layout appears more organized and the browser is now equipped with a helpful instrument search database that makes finding the right patch a lot easier.Īlso new is the Instruments Sidebar on the Player tab which displays all loaded instruments and their MIDI channel, audio output and volume controls for quick adjustments. The software can be downloaded for free via the EW Installation Center, East West’s own download manager.Īpart from a shiny new look, version 6 of East West’s PLAY engine comes with some pretty neat updates. Hollywood Choirs requires the latest version of PLAY in order to run properly. While the Diamond Edition is a whopping 59 GB in size, the feature-reduced Gold and Composer Cloud Editions comes with 8 GB and 16 GB respectively. Like all the other libraries made by East West, Hollywood Choirs is powered by the developer’s very own sampling engine PLAY 6 which you can download for free prior to installing the product. The samples were recorded using not less than 13 microphones positioned across the hall, that can freely be mixed and controlled via 5 microphone groups in the GUI (referring to the Diamond Edition of Hollywood Choirs). It features a full-size, symphonic women’s and men’s choir, both accessible individually. Hollywood Choirs was recorded in the same hall as East West’s other Hollywood-series instruments. Please keep in mind that other editions like the Gold (Main mics only, 16bit) or Composer Cloud Edition (Main & Surround Mics, 16bit) include less or other microphone constellations and bit depths. Note: For our test, we were provided with the Diamond Edition of Hollywood Choirs which features all available microphone mixes and comes in 24bit format. Now East West teamed up again with Quantum Leap, trying to bring back the glory of their award-winning Symphonic Choirs library and take it to today’s standards. Among those are amazing choral products like 8dio‘s Lacrimosa, Strezov Sampling’s Storm Choir or more recently Performance Sampling‘s streamlined Oceania Choir. So much, that the engine alone came with its own, 200+ page manual.Īlmost 15 years later, sampling world has progressed massively and a lot of really powerful, great sounding and easy-to-use symphonic choir libraries came out since then. While the library did in fact yield amazing results, the WordBuilder engine was an absolute nightmare in terms of usability and control. I remember working in studios quite a few years back, that were heavily relying on Symphonic Choirs for orchestral productions. This unique feature and the overall convincing, cinematic sound of the instrument made Symphonic Choirs a huge success and was pretty much used by every film composer working with samples back in the day. Not only made it a full symphonic, Hollywood-style choir available to any composer, it also came with a groundbreaking new WordBuilder feature, that for the first time ever allowed for typing in lyrics – or phonetics rather – which would be sung by the choir. When East West/Quantum Leap brought out Symphonic Choirs back in 2005, the library’s concept and engine was a real game changer.
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