How adjust choir sounds for a less spectral sound?

Dorico
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I’ve recently moved over from Finale (RIP), whose choral voices sound close, clear, and specific. Dorico Pro is giving me the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing in the shower. I have figured out how to reduce the reverb, but haven’t solved note attacks that fill after the beat, making any kind of rapid movement incomprehensible. I’m not an experienced sound engineer. Could someone please guide me to the tools and settings that can handle this?

2 Likes
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Hello Douglas, and welcome to the forum! Are you using the Dorico Default Sounds, or any third party VST?

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You can certainly use the GIFF or GPO5 voices in Dorico if you want. (I actually prefer the Full Choir KS to the separate instruments, both for range and tone.)

Garritan sounds are all pretty ‘in yer face’, and are intended to have ‘space’ added to them. Dorico’s Space and Stage settings are very good at this.

Slow attack is a common problem in a lot of choir samples, even the high-end ones.

The Olympus Micro “Legato Ah” is “reasonably OK”. My main gripe with it is tuning. (Just like a real choir!)

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Just the Dorico Default Sounds. At this point, anything else just makes my hair hurt.

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Hello Douglas, I am a Finale transplant too, and I use its choral sounds to make practice tracks for my church’s choir. In Finale I use the “Concert Hall 1” reverb level, as the choir agrees that any wetter makes it hard for them to hear their parts. I was unable to find anything on the Dorico forum about removing reverb, so would you please share what you did to reduce the reverb? Any reduction helps.

Thanks,

Joel Hoshaw

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Joel, the best I’ve been able to do with the standard choral voices is, when the score is created, to go into Hide/Restore Zones, which shows an equalizer on the lower left. There I select Instruments / FX, and slide the Reverb slider downward. I also select the Live Space icon, which looks like two sets of curves bouncing off each other, and turn off Far Send and Near Send. Now, when I play the score, the voices still have the etherial “oo” quality but they cut off when they should, without echo. I suspect this is a pretty amateur solution – I’m not working in Dorico right now as I complete a video script project – but it’s the best I can offer. I welcome other folks to chime in, remembering that they’re talking to people like you and me who still find Dorico to be a vast unknown controlscape filled with inscrutable knobs and levers.