Symphonic Choirs and Wordbuilder - does it deliver?

[rendelius]

I am seriously considering buying East West Symphonic Choir and the Wordbuilder Utility. Now, even at the reduced price now, this is a lot of money, so I would like to hear your your experience with this library in terms of quality and ease of use.

I am especially interested in how this library sounds in rather quiet mixes. It's not too hard to make a choir sound good when it blends with a whole orchestra - but how does SC sound a capella? Are the phrases understandable?

How long would it take, for example, to build a four liner of text that really sounds good when sung?

And finally - does SC include male and female solo voices or does it only cater choirs?

Thanks in advance.

[Zanenaz]

Hello,

I've been using SC for a few months now and it's the only game in town--IF you need all possible sound combinations at your disposal.

I use SC in FL Studio without Wordbuilder, with Kontakt 2 which gives the program alot more flexability, imo, what with all the scripts that one can apply to the samples. Plus Kontakt allows one to "purge" unused samples thereby freeing up alot of memory.

Wordbuilder in "standalone" was a big let down as there were very few words that "sang believably" right out of the box. A few minutes of tweaking is still going to be necessary even with Wordbuilder as it takes a generalized, simple approach to its stringing of phonems together--probably copied from the pronunciation guide out of or more dictionaries.

Without Wordbuilder, and having used SC for 3 months, I'm NOW putting text together at a rate of...oh....5 to 10 minutes for each connected syllable. Wordbuilder would probably chop a couple of minutes off that--but you'd STILL be spending AT LEAST 4 to 8 minutes per each connected syllable--and that's working at top speed...but is that really so bad?

I worked on 4 lines of text for 3 months at about 2 hours a day...what's that, 180 hours...knowing what I know now, it would still take me a good 90 hours...

To really give the illusion of a real choir MUCH MUCH tweaking is necessary. You ask "are the phrases understandable"...well...since all vowel and consonants are possible--a given phrases "understandability" is up to the composer--to keep tweaking until it sounds good....Eventually it does.

Any sample group--ie close, far, or ambient will sound quiet when used alone as those three microphone positions are meant to be used together--so I hope you have alot of memory, at least one gig...a good workaround is to use the close miked ones with a quality reverb. The sound quality of the actual samples is very good, and I doubt there would be a noisefloor issue, using the samples accapella, whether in triplicate, or with just the closemiked ones...

I DO wonder about certain decisions the authors made...for instance, the vowel sound contained in the word "sand" or "lack" , which is a pure or prime vowel sound, can ONLY be made by combining the "ah" and "eh" vowel sounds--iow the authors chose to treat a primary color as secondary one which was imo a bad choice, because EVEN with Wordbuilder combining those sounds, you can hear half the singers singing "eh" and the other half "ah"...

Oh...3 of my disks wouldn't read, and a fourth went bad a week later...In both cases EastWest Fedexed replacemeants the next day!

Will I use this program beyond my current project?
Yes, although I DO get bored tweaking phonems--it gets REEEEEEAL tacky when all of a sudden a particular word JUST
WON'T SOUND RIGHT ....until a good nights sleep....lol...Certainly the idea of what "composing" means is
changing...for the better or worse remains to be seen..


Mike

[rendelius]

Gosh, 90 hours for a four liner? I was hoping for something like an hour or so - do you use the 2.0 version of Wordbuilder (the one you can buy for $50?)

[Zanenaz]

Hi again


Well...It won't take you one hour unless your standards are REALLY low, and it won't take you 90 either--that was probably a bad guess--I'd stick with 5 to 10 minutes per syllable, with usually one problem syllable per line--give those 30 minutes... 10 to 15 syllables per line...maybe 6 to 8 hours for just the 4 lines to sound natural...

then there's the actual melodies, the arranging, dynamics, trying out different articulations...when you take in ALL the things that go into "working on a piece" ...a four liner could take quite a few hours...

Looking back on my work: I was learning and experimenting and making every mistake...plus my piece was four intertwining parts, 6 voices including boys choir--all singing a kind of contrapuntal "round" --I tweaked every repeat so they were not identical--humanized them, and this alone ate up a week or so...then it had to fit into the context of a Neil Youngish "rock" sound...so I had alot of mixing to do... maybe now the whole thing would take 40 or 50 "dedicated" hours, not 90...

If you check out the EastWest forum on SC and Wordbuilder-- I believe the consensus is--that Wordbuilder is not a free lunch--it will only take you half the way there...patience is a real virtue here--plus being able to "hear" in your head how words are put together phonetically, so YOU are in control, NOT wordbuilder...

It's a great value at 400 bucks or so...plus there will NEVER be a MODELLED CHOIR--that would seem impossible, so samples will always be the best choice, other than a real choir.

Like anything else, the more you do it the better you get...

Consider asking yourself how often you will use SC if it's frustrationg at first--for it WILL BE...then you'll have 400 bucks ill spent...But if you are into choral music and have a strong desire to learn it SC, you will, and you'll have made an excellent purchase...
Mike

[Zanenaz]

And finally - does SC include male and female solo voices or does it only cater choirs?

Thanks in advance.

you get 5 complete sections: boys, bass, tenor, alto, and soprano..

there are solo singers, but they do "ooo" and "aah" and the like...

[Bob Nova]

This thread is a perfect example of why internet forums are better than magazine reviews of products.

The mag review I read paid scant attention to how long it realistically takes to program the Wordbuilder.

This is quite informative.

[rendelius]

absolutely. The information was extremely useful for me. Thanks for these answers.

[jeffn1]

Yes, in my experience it takes a long time to get decent results (on the other hand, everything takes me a long time). But, I think the result are pretty cool.

I tend to think its best use is in small section to add something to a composition that would otherwise be unavailable to you. For example, an choir intro to a heavy metal song or as an addition to a part of a piece. I think its amazing for this sort of thing.

The idea of mocking up a full choir composition, however, would not thrill me.

jeffn1

[brewt]

Shameless Plug for My Way of Thinking:

http://home.comcast.net/~brentishere/How_to_Sing.html

I know I know I know: it's not going to produce a genuinely convincing human choir replacement sound, it's not going to render all human choirs obsolete, it's not going to even make you drool.

But it does take less than 10 minutes per phoneme. And it costs considerably less than the $1000 needed for Symphonic Choirs + Kontakt2.

Examples at
http://home.comcast.net/~brentishere/
and
http://www.freewebtown.com/brewt/

One of the better examples:
Page: http://home.comcast.net/~brentishere/ToMorning.html
Tune: http://home.comcast.net/~brentishere/mu ... orning.mp3
Score: http://home.comcast.net/~brentishere/mu ... orning.pdf

-bjc