Cantai for Intel Mac progress report (sort of)

Dorico
1

I finally took the plunge, jumped through all the hoops to get the education discount (I’m a teacher but don’t teach at a school), bought, downloaded and installed cantai for Intel Mac.

Richard’s claim that he intended cantai to be similarly plug and play compared to Note Performer I found to be something of a joke. It’s no such thing. However, after following detailed step by step instructions from the Google ai assistant, I was able in several hours to get the NP piano to stop sounding like trumpets and the vocal Soprano I selected to stop sounding like a drunken tenor who could only hum the tune and not sing words. Great! The result is quite good, although I made the mistake of selecting Elise as my voice. She’s very ‘country’ and does not fit my old-fashioned lyric religious solo. So I tried Maria (good except straining a lot on the high notes) and Kim (who took three minutes to render where the other two were done in seconds, and who could not be comfortable on the top three notes).

So (at last) my question is this. With a vocal range of B4 to F6, which soprano voice should be able to handle the top of the range without straining and yet still have plenty of support at the lower end? Or should I transpose to a different key and use a non-soprano voice?

Yes, I could go through and check every voice, but I’m hoping I can save a bit of time (and frustration) by letting somebody who has ‘been there and done that’ advise me.

Please and thank you.

--L3B

2

For now, I have transposed down a major 2nd, so the range is now A4 to E-flat 6, and I’m using the Mezzo voice Aggie, which is pretty close to fine. I’d still appreciate feedback from others however. Thanks.

3

Ottetto is the most obvious choice if you are setting sacred music – though other individual singers can be very nice in certain areas – I like Hannah in particular. I’m not sure if any of the voices are flawless at the top of the range (though F6 shouldn’t present problems) and there is a general tendency for the low notes to be rather underpowered, though the latest version is not too bad.

Incidentally, although Cantai often doesn’t respond to dynamic changes in the key editor, if you have a dynamic which is obviously wrong like a p being almost inaudible, you can always put in a new dynamic in the score but hide it by changing the background to white for instance.

4

I tried both soprano Ottetto voices. Both horrible for this song. I’ll try Hannah. Thanks.

5

Tried Hannah. Except for some pitch insecurity here and there, she’s quite good, with good support throughout the range and no straining on even the highest notes. She’ll do nicely in the original key. Thanks for the tip.

6

glad you enjoy her!