Made with Dorico - 'Disease X'

Dorico
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I’ve continued working on my piece about the pandemic, and I’ve reached a point where I’ve had enough! It’s been 18 months of slog, to be honest. Luckily, I think it’s in quite a good state and ready to share with string orchestras and choirs who might play it. Or some of it.

I have renamed it to ‘Disease X’. This was a term invented by WHO in 2018 for a pandemic caused by an unknown virus or bacterium.

Here’s a link to a Soundcloud album of the mock-ups. The renders from Dorico have been mixed in Cubase. It lasts about 90 minutes.

Thanks to the many people on the forum who have helped me - and especially Hugo Bouma! I have learned a huge amount from folks here, and from Elaine Gould.

It’s rendered using NP4.5 / NPPE / with BBCSO core and EW Hollywood Choirs playback engines for the most part, with some directly hosted BBCSO instances for missing playing techniques. The solo voices are from Cantamus, with a few glitches and missing words!

In Cubase, I have added a lot of volume automation to improve the balance and smoothness of the raw renders. There are only minimal added effects - a tiny bit of long reverb and some minor EQing in places. I haven’t rendered divisi differently from full sections. It just turned out to be too complicated in Dorico as it currently is.

There are still some phasing effects coming from the Noteperformer handling of unisons. I’ve reduced them but in some cases they are still there.

To my ears, Hollywood Choirs sound better than AI generative tools at the moment, even if they just sing Ah. Maybe in a year or so, that will change.

6 Likes
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this is certainly an admirably ambitious project and I find what I’ve heard interesting enough to hopefully get through the whole thing in due course. Just a question about the choral sections – is there actually some text there and if so why didn’t you set it in Wordbuilder (that’s after all the main reason I use that choir in the first place!)?

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An impressive project. Congratulations!

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Thanks very much! I’ve listened to some examples of output from Wordbuilder produced by other people and I didn’t warm to it. If you have some good examples I will take another listen.

All choral sections do have words.

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Thank you!

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well, good is a relative term! But even though you can only hear a relatively small percentage of the words clearly, it’s still to my mind far better than bland Aah’s which countless other choirs can also do. I suggest trying any of the sacred choral works here which all use the Hollywood choir and then you can decide for yourself.

1 Like