Agreed. I found that Opus doesn’t support the word builder feature for me (as a plugin in anything, nor in stand alone mode).
In Play 6, word builder doesn’t work when hosted directly in Dorico (text doesn’t advance and notes stick); however, if I bridge it through an instance of Bidule it’s up and running and seems to do well.
With Play 5, it works fine in Dorico, but the votox text required seems to be a bit different…and things I made in Play 6 don’t seem to be ‘backwards compatible’ with Play 5.
I haven’t had time to try Play 6 out with jbridge yet.
I’d be careful in saying without qualification that the HC is just an updated version of SC. For a start, the newcomer only has men and women Wordbuilder choirs as opposed to the SATB of Symphonic Choirs and the sound is quite different. Which is preferable is a matter of choice but one doesn’t replace the other.
an interesting workaround which you already mentioned. I’d be interested in what way the votox text is different. Is it possible to give concreate examples?
I agree entirely in principle but composers who are not writing to commission can often have problems getting performances of their works, especially by professional musicians. For such people (and I include myself in this), notation software is not just notation but also a way of bringing the music to life with virtual instruments. Indeed, as the mockups improve, there is an ever-growing demand for them to give an idea of the music, ideally together with a score.
And I don’t exclude choirs from this despite the current limitations with available software.
Off the top of my head…maybe not ‘exactly’, but in Play 5, a letter k does nothing. Needs a cap K. Some other constants seemed different. t, T, etc. Things that work in Play 6 while entering votox do nothing in Play 5.
I can definitely nice phrases sung in Play 5, hosted directly via Dorico! I just found the votox slightly different than when doing it in Play 6. Mostly a matter of changing some consonants from lower case to a cap.
It might have been in a different ‘mode’ (Latin vs English), but I think I checked that.
I was not able to ‘import’ phrases into Play 5 made in Play 6 either. I tried to force it, but it crashed the plugin. I did not try the other way around (importing things from 5 to 6). Play 5 and Play 6 do keep phrases in different places on my system.
I wasn’t aware that any change had been made to Votox itself but certainly with all the Play versions up to 5, there was only ever a capital K for instance so something seems to be going on!
I am pretty new to anything EW, so these are quick impressions and trials.
So far I’ve been focusing on the Symphonic Choirs that have SATB/Boys…haven’t tinkered yet with Hollywood Choirs (more powerful sound…just Men and Women sections).
I was looking at the latest set of Docs up on the website while making things in Play 6. I played with it in stand alone for a while to get a feel for what it’s ‘supposed’ to be doing first.
I then loaded it (Play 6) into Dorico via Bidule and played around with it. Not a bad experience at all! Entered a hymn verse and learned a few things…like, it’s much easier/quicker with Dorico to get nice phrases if one carries consonants at the end of words over to the beginning of the next word instead of spending too much time trying to get note lengths right and ‘time everything’ in the editor. I.E. Instead of:
“TiEK ma laEF And leT ET bE”
I’d do:
“TiE Kma laE Fun dle TE TbE”
Ending words on a vowel made quicker/easier work of it. At least when just roughing it in. Can go back and work out fine details later.
Out of curiosity I rolled back to play 5. It doesn’t come in a VST3 variant, but the VST2 one worked fine, with no bridge. I set about entering votox using the newest docs I had before, and some things seemed ‘different’. By trial and error I discovered that if I enter a consonant and it doesn’t show up in the editor, try it as a cap…and boom, there it is.
Tried to import the phrases I’d saved in Play 6. They were still on my system, but in a different directory. Play 5 kept it in “Program Files”, while Play 6 was keeping it in “ProgramData”. Play 5 was NOT able to import them in my trial.
As an aside, I’m pretty impressed. This library has a LOT of potential! A little practice and I think one can get some amazing results.
The biggest ‘obvious’ difference between 5 and 6 seems to be the ability in 6 to grab instruments from online from inside play (one at the time without grabbing an entire library first), and maybe some other tagging and organizational features.
Looks like you are correct. I’ve checked out the table. Lower k is ‘phonetics’ mode. My bad.
Still, in Play 6, when in votox mode, it accepts either one (same sample is triggered). In play 5, in votox mode, it HAS to be capped. I suppose word builder in Play 6 is just ‘more forgiving’ about using lower case for the T, K, P, and X (perhaps others that only have an upper case meaning).
I am sorry if I have upset you, but it has been difficult to find out just what can be achieved vocally with Dorico. There do not seem to be many places where choir music is discussed, and I am more frustrated than angry, more disappointed than anything else.
I can just use Dorico to write and print out for uses, but with all other forms of use, Dorico has so much to offer, and to be able to hear as near as possible to what it would sound like, like the orchestral examples I have found on this website, this would be such a bonus.
I realise the technical difficulties with vocal music : as well as the normal aspects - pitch, tempo, volume, etc, vocal music has all the phonetic elements to add, and the difficulties of blending different voices to produce a choral sound. Even with all of these extra elements, it does seem a pity that no realistic choral/vocal sound is available.
Perhaps, as a beginner, I am looking for too much to work towards. I know that my music will be mainly choral - a capella, with small accompaniment, possibly all the way to orchestal and choral accompaniment, and to find that Dorico cannot help me to any great extent with anything more than well produced sheet music is a great pity.
I will wait for replies, but I do not think Dorico is going to be what I expected. Expert advice can be useful if it can give me some idea as to how to proceed, but just to call my initial reaction on Dorico as absurd does not help anyone.
It’s not absurd at all. It can sound pretty BAD until we learn to set up our instruments, and teach Dorico how we want the score ‘interpreted’.
There is a major learning curve with learning to mix, and get instruments to do the ‘musical’ things in accordance to the marks on our scores. The stuff that comes with Dorico is very capable of really nice mock-ups, but at this point WE users have to teach our scores to do the HSO, Artist, and Basic instruments that ship with Dorico justice.
For someone who is just getting started in the world of electronic music, it might be worth it to try out Note Performer, and just focus on composing. You can try it for 30 days at no cost.
The advantage to that option is that NP puts a lot of emphasis on providing somewhat decent score interpretation out of the box (includes expression maps, and where possible makes some smart musical choices on its own based on things like tempo/velocity/etc.). They’ve put time and resources, specifically behind having it ‘just work’ with the most popular scoring apps.
NP will not give you ‘words’ with your vocal parts…but it might bring you a step closer to ‘expectations’ right away, and you could learn about teaching the stuff included in Dorico, and other libraries at your leisure from there.
@bill19 The limitations are not Dorico’s – you’re not going to get better results using Sibelius or Notion or Logic or Cubase or anything else. It’s simply the state of ‘synthesised singing’ right now.
I’m pretty much a beginner at choral writing, but what I do is compose the tune for SATB in Dorico, using approximate instrument sounds, to make sure it all sounds reasonably OK. I add lyrics too. Then, using the score, I play it into Cubase using the actual choir VSTs, in my case All Saints Choir, or Eric Whitacre, or the various EastWest instruments. If using a WordBuilder choir, I’ll paste the lyrics in then mess about with them to try and make them sound “realistic”. All this takes a lot of time, with much experimentation with the various choirs.
I’ve tried composing directly into Cubase, but after much trial and error have found that, for me at least, starting the process in Dorico is a better workflow. Of course there are other DAWs too - Reaper springs to mind.
Maybe one day Dorico will have the full power of Cubase, but until then, I’ve found my workflow to be pretty productive.
I switch between two completely different attitudes when dealing with choral music:
Work with the bare minimum of phonemes, maybe just one or two vowels.
Let the player deal with the words and phrases.
In the first case, that I prefer while composing (with the actual words only written in the Lyrics part of the score), I use any choir that can sound decent. It can be NotePerformer, or something like VSL choirs, treated as any other instruments, with the usual articulations of staccato, vibrato, molto vibrato, legato…
In the second case I let the choral library play words or phrases, with Dorico just triggering them. A hidden stave sends the triggering messages to the player. I use Dominus Pro, but the same can be done with any choral library capable of creating phrases (Soundiron Olympus, 8Dio Insolidus, Sonokinetic Espressivo…).
Thank you, your comments are very helpful, and I will try Note Performer as a starting point.
I investigated on the internet, and found that the facility I was thinking of is called Word Builder, but the only place I found details about it was in the East West website. The cost was not specified, but I would need a big upgrade on my computer (I3 at present, recommended level I5 possibly a quad chip), so I would have to save up to upgrade.
In the meantime, your suggestion would seem to be the best way to investigate this area. When I found Eric Whitaker’s choral software, I found that he had flatly stopped any idea of a Word Builder type facility.
Thank you for your helpful comments. I investigated , but found Eric Whitaker’s software doesn’t have a Wordbuilder add on, and only East West seem to have included this option.
However, my computer is not capable of using this , so an upgrade is in order. In the meantime, I will try to use some form of program (someone else suggested Note Performer, even though it does not do all that I want, at least it gets me started.
It might or might not. The good news is that you can try it for free. If it looks promising after 30 days, you can elect to lease to own in $10mo installments until it is fully yours. I think the total price is around $150 US?
On EW libraries, they are running a big summer sale for full unlimited licenses, or to join their cloud. I decided to join the cloud for a year as a treat to myself and explore (there’s enough there to take years to explore it all), but I rather ‘enjoy’ playing with and evaluating instruments.
The EW instruments are quite nice for many types of compositions, but they also come with a learning curve and time invested in learning to use them. I’m not sure if they have a ‘demo key’ for the choirs…seems like they should if you contact them and ask. If they don’t have free demos, the next best thing would be to subscribe for JUST ONE MONTH (I don’t think you get the discount for only one month…but it shouldn’t be more than $15 or $20 to get a month of access), try some things, and decide from there if you’d like to subscribe again, or buy something outright. With cloud access, you can use pretty much ALL of their instruments…choirs, orchestras, pianos, harps, EVERYTHING.
Trying it yourself, on your own hardware is really the only way to know if it’s worth it to you.
Oh, I don’t think Symphonic and Hollywood Choirs are very CPU intensive. If you have older/slower storage media for streaming the samples, you’ll want plenty of memory. I have a pretty modern Ryzen9 12 core rig here, with fast NVME.M2 SSD storage, 64gb RAM, and a small stream buffer size set in Play. Even with stream buffers set at their smallest setting, the choirs still take a while to ‘load’ in Play 5 and Play 6 (larger stream buffers=longer load times). Orchestra stuff takes some time to load for me too with Play, but is nearly instant loading for the stuff that works in Opus. Once it’s loaded and running though…the choirs and orchestras are not very CPU hungry.
Found it, but it doesn’t work for me as a plugin. Running stand alone and using my MIDI controller to play, it seems to work.
As a plugin in Dorico Opus VST3 just makes noise and gets stuck, in Bidule (the VST3 version) simply repeats the first sample over and over, doesn’t cycle the text. I also have Cubase 11, but haven’t tried it in that host yet.
What are you trying to achieve? The human voice is very difficult to mimic - we can fake it with instruments, just about (nothing is truly “the same” as real instruments).
The best we can do has already been described above with Word Builder, however if I’m honest I’m not too impressed with the results from even the geekiest user - if you’re not following the score and you close your eyes, EW just sounds garbled.
So my question to you - what are you trying to achieve? If it’s to create a good recording of your piece, then forget it - the technology is simply not there yet. It’s pointless spending hours wrestling with Word Builder at what I perceive to be an early point in your career.
If you’d like a representation to show people that might perform it then I suggest using other instruments to represent the voices - woodwind instruments work well.
If what you’d like to do is hear what your compositions sound like, the best way is to experiment with a bunch of like-minded friends. Are you at school? Can you put together a scratch choir to try stuff out? Is there a local university that puts on composition workshops? Are there local amateur choirs that might consider trying stuff out? Can you start one? Are there any you can find on the internet?
Dorico is a notation program, much though there is also the “play” element (an element I largely ignore). Unless you only are interested in computer-generated performances (very limited in the vocal department) then I would suggest writing for people to perform, rather than the software.
Hope that helps, and not meaning to put you off but I hope save you some time.