Dorico's voice samples

Dorico
1

Is there any way to improve Dorico’s vocal noises?

Firstly, they are really quiet: create a duet with harpsichord or piano accompaniment, and you can barely hear them over the keyboard.
Second, the attack is very poor, so they can’t really cope with short notes very well.

I have got other sound libraries, but it strikes me that something could be done ‘out of the box’ to make the HALion noises a bit better.

(Actually, the default balance of sounds is another issue: I recently did a project with strings and brass. The violins completely overwhelm the trumpets! When has that ever happened? :laughing: )

2

Unfortunately I think the vocal sounds are just not good enough, and any kind of tweaking would be little more than polishing a you-know-what.

I am hopeful that we will be able to source some improved vocal sounds for inclusion with a future version of Dorico, but there is no news on this at the moment.

3

This would be great — I hardly ever listen to the audio produced by Dorico, but whenever I do, it’s the vocal sounds that are by far the biggest problem. They always seem to be a little “behind” everyone else, which makes it really hard to check for wrong notes.

All the other sounds are perfectly fine for my purposes.

4

One thing that is really accurate is that the choir seems to be out of tune with the instruments on some chords.

5

I have also found Dorico’s voice samples to be poor. However, I have also found the voice samples in NotePerformer to be much better. If getting a copy of NotePerformer is even a possibility, you might like to download a trial copy and see what you think, particularly wrt the voice samples. Of course, the playback of NotePerformer has been much admired by Dorico users on this forum, as a quick search will reveal. (NotePerfomer is available at the link below and is quite reasonably priced at $129 US).

6

I can only second the opinions expressed here regarding Dorico’s voice sample quality. However, I’ve been struggling to find decent but simple vocal samples I can use for musical theatre scores. All I want is a straight-forward voice I can use for both long and short notes. Currently I’m using “Marcato Ahs”, but they are behind all the other instruments which makes fast songs sound very strange.

I quickly tried NotePerformer but wasn’t nearly as convinced as the raving reviews on their website.

Did someone find a good sound?

7

there are a lot of discussions on this, for instance this one Which sound library is best for choral compositions? - #71 by Neil_Sands which has a large number of varying ideas from the simple (which is probably what you want) to a fully fledged choirs with text facility.

8

Since the discussion on this thread three years ago, Dorico 3 shipped with new, improved, choral sounds supplied by Olympus (working within the Halion SE player by default). Is your project using these samples?

I confess that I have little experience of using the Olympus samples as I tend to just use NotePerformer for everything, but thought it was worth pointing out that since the above conversation Dorico does indeed now come with improved vocal samples than the default HALion set.