Dorico Pro 5 using Eastwest choirs and WordBuilder for choir a capella

Dorico
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Hello everyone,

I discovered the interesting posts by @Johnkprice and @dko22 and others in the forum about Eastwest choirs and WordBuilder with Dorico.

I find @Johnkprice’s example Symphonic Choirs Sample really well done and as someone who previously only knew “a” and “o”, I am amazed at what else is possible.

I only started using Dorico Pro 5 and then Noteperformer 4 in September and am now interested in WordBuilder and in trying out eastwest composercloud for a year initially, also in the hope of achieving better playback results for choir “a capella” in Dorico Pro 5 than with Olympus Choir Elements, which I have just been able to purchase on offer.

I found some videos that cover the WordBuilder with the choir libraries and DAWs like Cubase with MIDI keyboard input, :round_pushpin: but none on using it directly with the notation software. :round_pushpin:

A question of understanding as a beginner, for which I found no direct reference here or even at eastwest in the quick reference:

:round_pushpin: How does the *interaction of WordBuilder with Dorico work? Can Hollywood Choirs recognize the text that I have written under the notes as “lyrics” in Dorico and then interpret it correctly, or do I have to write the vowels and consonants above each note as a “playing technique”, similar to the Olympus Choir?

:round_pushpin: Are there any tutorials on using WordBuilder and EW choirs with Dorico Pro?

It’s still a big learning curve for me… I also bought Cubase 13 Elements, but I’m not familiar with using it other than recording short tracks with a keyboard and microphone to test sounds.

I don’t know how I can interact between :round_pushpin: Dorico Pro 5 and Cubase 13 (Elements) :round_pushpin: to get the best out of it: I am also interested in tutorials on this.

Thank you!

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it would be lovely if Wordbuilder recognised the lyrics entered in Dorico but I’m afraid for now that just a pipe dream. You must do both separately. However, if you’re writing in English, it’s worth copying the text from Dorico and pasting it directly into the English (NOT votox) Wordbuilder. Even in Latin, as that language is fairly phonetic, it can save time copying the text into the Votox line in WB. Either way, some corrections will be needed and you’ll need to spell out any melismas as Wordbuilder cannot understand a continuation underscore (even if it were copied).

The good news is you don’t need any special Expression Maps for Wordbuilder , though I’d ensure that you add CC11 as a secondary controller as all EW libraries distinguish between CC1 (tone) and CC11 (pure volume) dynamics.

In my opinion (and not everyone agrees), if you’re writing sacred choral music, it’s easier to do this with the newer Hollywood Choir than Symphonic choirs and you only have male and female choirs. The sound is a bit smoother and weightier. All my sacred choral works have now been converted to that library – if you want any more examples, you can always try out this link https://play.reelcrafter.com/dko22/vocalmusic All of these have been done 100% in Dorico with not a DAW in sight! If you prefer simpler hymn-style arrangements as examples, then there are a few doing these on the Dorico forum to search for.

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incidentally, specifically on your question about how the Olympus choir works in case it wasn’t clear, there is no need for playing technique changes as this is taken care of automatically by Wordbuilder. In Dorico, you simply write the music and the text (of course with appropriate dynamics)

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Many thanks for your quick and detailed reply and the audio examples, David.

Great that your beautiful music can sound so good without a DAW. I was also thinking of trying the Hollywood choirs first when I start a year there. I would “limit” myself to “a capella” SATB choir and Latin at first and maybe try some of the orchestras or soloists.

Although I might also find it appealing to try something with English text. Coming from Capella (since the late 1990’s) and MuseScore (briefly last year), I don’t even really have a clue about things like CC controllers that you mentioned and still often struggle with the mixer sliders, inserts, key editor and settings when I’m not using Noteperformer, which I usually do.

But now I’ve added the Kalimba from the February Deals :wink: and with time I’ll also try more with Halion Sonic. But I’ll have a look at some more tutorials. I’m also not sure whether I’ll need Halion 7 later.

So far, I’ve only composed relatively short music and occasionally tried to shorten a note in the editor or change the volume, and that’s it. I’ll take a closer look at the notation options soon. At least I’ve already learned how to insert page changes with title pages etc. and voices.

So maybe I’ll just try out composercloud for a year and see if I can get to grips with it. Nice that there are also users here who have experience with eastwest and WordBuilder. I’m now enjoying Dorico more than I initially thought, even if I’m probably making some things more complicated than they should be because I don’t know all the subtleties yet.

Now I’m curious to see if I can get the hang of combining Dorico and Cubase with each other and find a few tutorials if some exist.

Many thanks and best regards
Tilman

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On CC controllers – I wouldn’t worry too much about that if writing for Wordbuilder choirs. It’s really just dynamic refinements you can experiment with later once you’ve got the fundamentals mastered. Incidentally, I don’t normally do much work with Wordbuilder other than checking the pronunciation is not too awful for my own mock-ups so you should quite easily be able to achieve similar results with Hollywood choirs.

There isn’t yet tight integration between Dorico and Cubase but files can be exchanged through MIDI for instance. There are plenty of threads with tips if you go down that road --I try to compose almost exclusively in Dorico.

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Thank you for your message and information. I hope to be able to watch some more tutorial videos soon…

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In regards to Hollywood Choirs and Opus, does anyone else here get stuck notes? Last week I tried using them again, on something very simple, and I still got stuck notes. I’m on an M2 Mac, 24 GIG RAM, 2 GIG SSD, running Monterey O.S., and the latest version of Dorico. I don’t have this problem with Kontakt, Spitfire, Orchestral Tools Sine, or Halion Sonic. Perhaps it runs fine on a Windows machine. Any ideas?

Mike

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no, only very rarely with Windows. I suggest trying Play instead of Opus as the choirs libraries were originally designed for Play and I still occasionally come across weird behaviour (esp. regarding dynamics) with Opus, though it’s nothing like as bad as it used to be.

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Thank you again, also for this information. I now have the
composercloud+ membership for a year and will give it a try. :wink:

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best of luck – will be interested to hear how you get on. If you get stuck with anything, odds are I (or someone else) will have had the same problem at some stage and will be able to advise.

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Thank you so much!

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I’m using Hollywood Choir on Windows 11 (16 Gb ram) with Wordbuilder on several project.
It works very well with Play. But, I experienced some crashes with opus.

The challenge is to synchronize lyrics, it takes a while on long projects.
The result is very nice.

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Thank you very much for your answer and information. That is encouraging. I’m curious to see how it works on my system, I’m probably somewhere in the middle between minimum requirement and recommended equipment and use Win11 23H2 with 32GB RAM and 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11600K @ 3.90 GHz and several data SSD, one of them as a mirror, and the system on 1 TB Samsung 980 Pro. I put the libraries on the data SSDs. And synchronizing the lyrics will certainly be a challenge. Now there are some downloads to do first. :).

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dko22,

If I download PLAY, is WORDBUILDER a separate download? Will PLAY automatically “see” my EastWest libraries? Thank you.

Mike

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Wordbuilder is integrated into your choir, not a separate download – it was in early versions of the choir but not any more. Play should see all the EW libraries it supports.

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Thank you, dko22.

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Unlike @dko22 , I prefer using the Symphonic Choirs to create renditions of sacred choral music. I also find that OPUS still has too many bugs for my taste, so I continue to use the PLAY sample engine, which can be downloaded from this webpage under Legacy software.

It takes a considerable amount of effort to get reasonably decent results using the Symphonic Choirs, arguably more effort than most people are willing to expend. I admit that my workflow is computationally intensive. However, if you would like to examine a sample project which demonstrates the most important aspects of my workflow, here is a Dorico project containing the first verse of The Church’s One Foundation:

Sample.dorico (2.4 MB)

In my workflow, the default played duration of each note is set to 100% of its written duration. However, diphthongs and final consonants do not normally occur until the corresponding note is released, so it is necessary to shorten the durations of notes in legato phrases so these sounds at the end of one syllable do not overlap the start of the next syllable. The Time Editor in WordBuilder shows how many milliseconds are needed at the end of a syllable for the diphthong and final consonants, if any. However, the Playback end offset property in Dorico is measured in ticks. To obtain the factor needed to convert milliseconds to ticks, divide the given tempo expressed in quarter notes per minute by 125. For example, the tempo in the sample project is q=100, so the conversion factor is 100 / 125 = 0.8.

To demonstrate how the durations of notes are shortened, open the sample project, switch to play mode, select the Soprano track, click on the e in the left panel to open PLAY, click on the WordBuilder icon, and in the Text Editor, click somewhere in the word Christ (spelled KraEST in Votox) in the third measure. Now click on the letter T at the bottom of the Time Editor and notice in the right center part of PLAY that the Off time is -305ms:

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To convert to ticks, multiply -305ms by the conversion factor 0.8 to obtain -244 ticks. Now close PLAY, switch to write mode and galley view, select the Soprano note corresponding to the word Christ, and in the properties panel, observe that the Playback end offset is set to -244.

As if having to do this for every syllable with a diphthong or final consonants isn’t hard enough, the same method must be applied separately to each section of the choir. For example, to sing the letter n at the end of the word one, it takes the SATB sections of the choir 100, 40, 120 and 97 milliseconds, respectively. Why do the tenors need three times as long as the altos to sing the letter n? I have no idea, but this adds to the effort required for my workflow.

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Symphonic Choirs and Hollywood Choirs have different characteristics. To be honest for simple monophonic harmonisations like the example given here, I’d use Cantamus which sounds much better (particularly with their gorgeous Latin). My own take is that Symphonic choirs have a more intimate sound and thus I use them for my fairytale and similar settings. Symphonic choirs tend to sound more “bitty” which is why there is a greater need for all the involved timing adjustments @johnkprice describes here which to me are indeed somewhat overkill for most requirements but of course that’s a personal decision.

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@johnkprice, thank you very much for your reply and the sample file and @dko22 for your replies. After Hollywood choirs, I have now downloaded the Symphonic Choirs as well, after having given up in frustration because I don’t know my way around all this and don’t know if and where I can find tutorials on how to work with a SATB a capella score of my own. Maybe I can find tutorial videos or pages somewhere? I also installed the ew Hollywood Solo Cello diamond for my cello solo compositions but was just as frustrated because in Noteperformer 4 it works perfectly right away without any major adjustments and sounds absolutely fine, and in eastwest I have no idea what I have to do to get it anywhere near Noteperformer. In fact, I’ve never actively worked with sample libraries before. I’m really a complete novice… Does anyone have any tips on the correct order of learning steps to become familar with using ew sample libraries with Dorico? Thank you so much!

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This is not an easy task, because no library was ever designed to be used in Notation software except NotePerformer, so it’s normal that you will find they are not practical from our point of view. Anyways, the first thing I would do is read the library’s user guide, which should describe the available samples, the articulations, and maybe the key switches to trigger them (or UACC or whatever… But this is very valuable information!)
Take some notes (because the amount of information can be overwhelming).
Then watch some videos from Anthony Hughes and John Barron about expression maps in Dorico. It is the bridge between a library and Dorico. Nothing really fancy or magical there, just some kind of elaborate plumbing.

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