I don’t intend to hijack this thread and make it about the choirs, but I’ll make this one post. Some of it (like tweaking Dorico’s Playback Options) might apply to the Opus Orchestra as well.
I’ve had pretty good luck recently, but one needs to get away from Dorico’s default playback options to smooth things out. Personally I go ahead and set ‘humanization’ to 0. With word builder, those few ticks can matter, and cause things to get kind of unpredictable.
I believe setting Default Note length a bit shorter helps. 95% or so.
Dail back legato overlapping as well…to something like 99% or 100%. If you need really expressive overlapping legato effects, it’s better to build those manually for the choirs using the key editor and CC lanes I think.
Personally, I believe the choirs run a little better in Play than Opus, though things should be improving for Opus with each update.
Another benefit to using Play at this time is that I think one can use MIDI RPN to tweak out things like pitch bend range, or do some custom tuning maps (not positive all this works for the choirs, but it should). I don’t think these RPN events work at all in Opus yet, and while some EW instruments have course and fine tuning controls, I’m not aware of a way to ‘automate’ them in real time via CC (And Dorico doesn’t yet feature VST automation). EW instruments don’t always have an obvious way to change the pitch bend range either. At least with Play, you can use the old school RPN method to establish your own PB range, master tuning, and custom tuning scales (Tested RPNs a bit with Goliath library and seems to work).
Put the phrase reset CC20 as an ‘initialization’ value in an expression map and one Natural node with the dynamics mode to CC11. These are the ONLY things I put in the expression map for these choirs. The rest (including manual adjustments to note velocity) I do manually with controller lanes. If I need ‘key-switches’, I’ll just add them as needed via technique/expression map, or even keep it simple and put them off in a ‘hidden piano stave’ where I can control precisely when it gets sent.
Don’t be afraid to use more instances with shorter phrases. I.E. At what one might consider ‘rehearsal points’ of a score, start a new Play or Opus instance with a fresh beginning for a phrase. This way as you are building a score you don’t always need to play the thing from the very beginning to make word builder reset and align the phrases. When auditioning things as you compose, you’ll always want to start playback from one of your ‘rehearsal points’ or things will sound a mess.
Personally, I’ve found using something like Bidule a huge help in working these choirs. I can more easily load and stage complete choir setups with loads of Play instances inside with a few clicks. In short, I can host entire choirs, with loads of ‘variations’ in what appears to Dorico to be a ‘single plugin/instrument’. Such setups are also quite easy to move over to other DAWs and Scoring suites as needed. Saves hours of ‘setup time’. Without Bidule, it might take 30 minutes to set up everything for a new ‘phrase or verse’ (by rehearsal points as mentioned earlier). With Bidule in play, I can quickly throw in a whole new ‘initialized choir’ and get back to work composing and building the vocal phrases. I can also more easily ‘swap among’ these different setups without needing loads of extra Players/Instruments in Dorico itself.
I’ll get back on topic and offer more about the Opus libraries later. I haven’t used these as much and haven’t run into ‘problems’ yet. Seeing the OP’s project and expression maps would be a big help though.