Hi Everyone,
I just bought EastWest Hollywood Choirs and I don’t know at all how to get it to work with Dorico Pro 4… Could someone please walk me through this process? I heard that there was a way to get this to work, I just don’t know what Im doing to make it work… LOL! Thanks in advance!
P.S. Or please point me in the right direction to a post that covers EXACTLY this.
It works but expect a considerable learning curve, and it’ll take some practice.
Hollywood, Symphonic, or both?
Which Edition? Gold, Platinum, Diamond, etc…
Do you also have a tracking DAW (Not mandatory but it might change how you approach some things)?
It helps to know these things before possibly typing up a starter tutorial for you, sharing some demo projects, etc.
In your early experimentation phases, I do recommend using the Play plugin instead of Opus. Word Builder in Play seems to be smoother and more accurate in Dorico to me than Opus on the few arrangements I’ve done thus far.
Thanks for responding… I purchased the EW Hollywood Choirs Diamond only. They had a nice sale on it.
Which version of Play do you reccomend I get? I have Dorico 4 Pro and I also have Logic Pro X for a DAW.
Glad you have Diamond. Same here, and I also still have the latest release of Dorico 4 installed so with some luck our projects might be ‘interchangeable’ without needing to rebuild the Play instances. I’m on Windows tho’…seems like you’re on a Mac. We can try to exchange some projects in PMs later to see how that works out.
There were once issues with Play and Opus both in Dorico. I don’t remember if the last service release for Dorico 4 covered the fixes or not, seems like it might, so, might as well grab the latest one and give it a try. It does seem to be fine in Dorico 5.
There are numerous threads I can’t find at the moment tracing issues people have had over the years, including links to get older versions of Play if you need them.
Before diving in with Dorico, I suggest having a look in Logic first while browsing the manual for the Choirs. The wordbuilder has a lot of little options and dynamic control can be pretty involved.
On my way to work…as soon as I can i’ll revisit the thread with more Dorico specific tips and tricks that have worked for me. Might be able to work up a quick step by step primer for getting started.
A tip: take care that for worldbuider every instance of Play or Opus has to be midi channel 1.
When you use Vienna Ensemble Pro you can use several instances of Opus/Play in one instance of VEPro by using the midi-ports.
When you use several midi-ports in Dorico you need to create midi-ports in the endpoint setup of that VST.
Good luck
One workflow that I use with these choirs and word builder is to separate text input into word-builder from scoring in Dorico. Order doesn’t matter.
These are powerful choirs – good luck.
I just ran some quick tests with Dorico 4.
I’m on Windows 11, and Play 6.1.9, VST3 appears to be working fine in Dorico 4. Hopefully the same applies for Mac.
Hollywood choirs works fine with both Play 6.1.9 and Opus. Originally Opus had a lot of bugs with odd dynamics but this has largely been sorted so I’d try both players to see which works best for you. Opus has the advantage of being able to set individual dynamic levels for each channel used for the voices which you can’t do with Play. As @mmka says, it’s absolutely essential to have a different instance for each choir part as they all use 6 or 12 channels
You don’t really need to worry about Expression Maps as there are no articulations as such when using Wordbuilder but do ensure you have the two dynamic controllers set to velocity and CC1 as they have slightly different functions and you need both-- experiment for best results (and in some cases you may need to also use CC11 for overall volume correction) . If your text is in English, I’d just write the lyrics in Dorico and copy them all directly into Wordbuilder. You’ll need to make some corrections, both for melismas and simply odd pronunciation but it will save time in the end.
This is terrific!!! I will be giving this a try tonight. My apologies for the late response, this season has had me gigging all over the place. I hope my Mac is gracious to me!
Thank all of you for these responses! Im about to get to work RIGHT NOW! I will let you all know how this goes for me…
Can you explain how i set up the dynamic controllers? I don’t understand how to do it. I use play 6.1.9
