If I were you I’d keep version 6 and write the arrangement in Dorico, and then export midi to Logic and then start working on the syllables. One of the limitations of the program is that it doesn’t ‘recognize’ where you are in the score so you may have to render syllables and sentences to audio and place them on the timeline.
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It’s definitely a fiddly process using WB with Dorico. There is a reset CC that you can use to go back to the start of your sentence, but you certainly can’t just start playback from halfway through a sentence. Therefore I have found that you have to have lots of fairly short sentences and use multiple instances of the PLAY VST. Okay for a short piece, but impractical for a longer work. I recently bought Fluffy Audio’s Dominus Choir Pro. They employ a slightly different way of creating sentences which can also work well, but again, only with shorter pieces. You can trigger the chains of syllables with key switches which you can assign to a Playing Technique in Dorico. Unfortunately the main legato mode of Dominus which is really incredible, will not work at present because there is no tempo sync functionality in Dorico. Hopefully this will be added in the future. Dominus is also mainly focused on Latin, and although you can approximate English words with their range of syllables, not all required syllables for English are present. It does sound great and I did start a project recently where I managed to combine both choirs successfully. It’s certainly a lot of work though… Dominus Choir Pro is $650 right now, so it’s also not cheap. Ultimately using a sequencer is easier I think…recording parts to audio as much as possible.
Yeah, that is the trick, using shorter phrases or sentences.
I can get it to work in Reaper (with score exported from Sibelius). One of the key tricks is that all midi has to be sent to channel 1 for WB to work, so if you can create an expression map or some way to force the midi from each of SATB to go to a separate instance of Play, each loaded up with a multi and all midi going to channel 1, it would work in Dorico. With all the limitations you mentioned.
Can you explain this a bit more? I used a separate VST instance for each singer, so:
Soprano: 02 Play
Alto: 03 Play
Tenor: 04 Play
Bass: 05 Play
Each set to Channel 1, but it still was very wrong. Delayed start by about 10 seconds; wrong notes, wrong syllables, etc.
I got different results depending on whether I set the ‘receiving’ channel to Multi, or Omni, or 1 or 6.
I’m afraid I can’t help you — below is a screenshot with my Play tab settings, with four instances of EW Play for each of SATB, all routed to channel 1.
There is no delay, but all I get is “ah” instead of whatever I type in Wordbuilder.
Here’s what is weird: when I click on individual notes in a staff, I do get the individual syllables picked by wordbuilder.
I don’t know what is going on.
At this point until somebody figures it all out it is just easier to write something in Dorico or Sibelius, export a midi file and import that into a DAW program. That gives you much more control not only over routing, but endless tweaking of individual phrases (WordBuilder is kind of a handful), where you can change the exact note length and start point, insert cc20,127 at each entry point, and so on. With some work you can pretty decent (or at least entertaining) results.
for the choir in WB, it only seems to work properly if you set play 1 and 2 both to women, not to individual sop and alto and likewise 3 and 4 to men. Otherwise the tuning tends to go haywire among other things. As the vocal ranges are too short, it’s really the only practical way to work anyway though of course it has the disadvantage that overlapping ranges are much louder than the ones specific to each voice so lots of dynamic adjustments are the order of the day.
To hear what’s supposed to be going on where you are in the score, do the CC28 reset and put the current text at the top of the WB window. It’s a bit of a pain but until someone brings out a new affordable choir with software which is more intelligent, it’s probably still the best there is. I’ve never found any reason to fiddle around with channel settings. You need to use them all (1-12 with the Men’s and Women’s choirs) otherwise you won’t get the sounds.
Yes, I’ve noticed that as well! Love the music, btw.
Thanks.
Will give that a try.
Love the community, getting it done!
Just putting my hand up to say: I got Symphonic Choirs. Have evidently the same problems as nearly everyone else. There is very little else available that does words – Vocaloid, which someone mentioned, is still an option for solo voices if you are very tolerant. My impression of EW products in general is that they seem to be somewhat heuristic in their approach; I find it hard to infer an intuitive solution to a given problem.
Hollywood Choirs was tempting to me only because I prefer to get the most recent version of things, where possible. In this case, though, the package seemed less inviting – I want my tenors to sound different from my baritones, for e.g.
where are we currently with Hollywood choirs? I see it’s 60% off at the moment. It’s PLAY 6 only compatible so does that mean that it definitely won’t work properly with Dorico as SC doesn’t with PLAY6? In theory, as it supposedly has a feature which allows you to play back text from the actual position in the score which would be great but I’ve no idea if it works. If it does work then it could be a huge time saver though from the demos I’ve heard, I’m not convinced it’s necessarily a better library in terms of sound.
If everyone who has EW choirs can contact their support, then hopefully we will provide them with enough data to get it fixed.
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After reading all the threads on the forum there are regarding this topic, I get a fairly global idea of the problem and the solutions provided, until they are fixed in the future by Steinberg or EW, or both . I only have one doubt in the meantime, does Hollywood Choirs work with Play 6 in Dorico 3.5 ?. It seemed to me that someone has said it in one of the threads. I do not know if I am right or I have read wrong. The truth is that your contributions are priceless, at least for me.
Thanks for the contributions and best regards.
Hollywood choirs will playback with Play 6 - but just a single syllable like “ooh” and will not invoke words from Word Builder. I use it in a DAW driven from Dorico where it works as designed. FWIW I think its pretty impressive compared to a single sample choir of some kind, but not completely intelligible. It’s a great improvement for a realistic choir with abstract sounds like say for a trailer. But you’re not gonna like it singing hymns or whatever unless you intend to layer real voices on top of it.
Just a quick update. I’ve just got VE Ensemble Pro and I thought I’d just try it it with the SC and Wordbuilder as there have been some posts suggesting it doesn’t work at all. I find – using Play 5 – as before, that it works in exactly the same way. With VE Pro, you just need to be aware that you need a separate instance for each of the four parts because of the highly unorthodox way it’s programmed.
Again, you must split the choir into two instances of Women’s and two of Men’s and rebalance the dynamics to reduce the common areas and boost the ones at the more extreme ends of the ranges. It’s a bit of a pain but I’m not aware of anyone who has found a quick and easy way with Symphonic Choirs and Wordbuilder.
I found the solution , use a VST host , ELEMENT (kushview) , setup an ELEMENT as a VST Instrument, in the "Element plugin " select a “Play” plugin and setup the inputs and outputs of play vst. It Works, setup the midi input in “Play” and the first 2 audio output (I can’t upload an image showing how)
sorry, but which supposed problem is ELEMENT a solution to?
sorry, i don’t speak english very well, i use a vst host “ELEMENT” by kushview as a instrument in dorico, and use the EW player 6 plugin inside the ELEMENT plugin, in this case wordbuilder works .
thanks -if it works with Play 6 then that’s certainly news!
Yes, I tested Symphonic Choirs, Hoollywood Choirs , messages like cc20, cc21, etc and all works every time with “Player 6” and “Element”.
thanks for that – very interesting. Does it really work correctly with the note off problem? This is when you repeat the same note (unless there’s a break), Wordbuilder gets confused as unlike in Play 5, it requires note off information in this situation and fails to repeat the note, immediately causing the text to get out of sequence. This is a confirmed issue by EWQL tech support with WB in Play 6 with notation software though DAWs generally will send the note off information and are not affected.
I found a very bad problem, when exporting the audio, in the audio file the syllables are cut off, it goes through all the text, syllable by syllable but they are short sounds , when the song is reproduced in dorico there is no problem.