The Sound Board

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 3:41 am**

Since yesterday EW released Hollywood Choirs: http://www.soundsonline.com/hollywood-choirs

Videos and demos are now available and can be seen and heard on the page linked above. The trailer is beyond horrible in my opinion, but loaded up the choir this morning (the goldx version from the Cloud) and I can see good use for this choir in addition to other choirs. It get slashed quite a bit on the other place and maybe justified here and there, but in general I think they delivered a good workable product. The new Play 6 is needed for this and not showing in my cloud, but you can grab it here for manual download: http://www.soundsonline.com/Support?section=updates
I like what they did with Play 6! I like the browser and navigation.

General info about Hollywood Choirs:

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS is a brand new, ground up, choirs virtual instrument from Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix, the producers of Symphonic Choirs, the best-selling and most awarded virtual choir of all time.

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS features a blockbuster female and male choir with unprecedented dynamics that will instantly transform your next project into a cinematic masterpiece.

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS also includes a new improved WordBuilder plugin. WordBuilder allows the composer to type in any word or phrase and have it sung by the choir. 26 additional phonemes were recorded for Hollywood Choirs compared to it's predecessor Symphonic Choirs resulting in improved realism and support for more languages. For convenience you can now sync WordBuilder to your DAW so it follows the track. The new group Instrument loading avoids having to load up to 13 Instruments, and there are many more incredible under the hood improvements resulting in an easier to use superior tool.

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS includes 110 new editable pre-built WordBuilder phrases in English, German, and Latin that are exclusive to this product, and that can be quickly and effortlessly dropped into your mix or used as a starting point to create your own custom phrases.

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS Diamond Edition includes a 13 microphone user-controllable setup (including a Neumann Dummy Head) designed for surround sound and virtual reality, an essential feature for film, TV, and game composers.

HOLLYWOOD CHOIRS delivers that powerful, blockbuster sound that all composers are seeking and opens up new 3D soundscapes that will help create incredible and emotional journeys for your audiences for many years to come.

"This is the third choir EastWest/Quantum Leap has recorded," says EastWest producer Doug Rogers, "we learnt a lot from the previous productions and Hollywood Choirs is the culmination of that experience. In particular, the choirs' ability to sing any word or phrase has been significantly improved resulting in more realism; and there are many more sound options to enable the user to sculpt the sound to their requirements."

"In the past 12 years, there have been many attempts by others to improve on what EastWest/Quantum Leap achieved with Symphonic Choirs," says EastWest producer Nick Phoenix, "Small improvements were made to various aspects of choir sampling, but the emphasis has been on pre-recorded and severely limited phrases. If composers are not tired of hearing the same faux Latin phrases repeated over and over, those listening certainly are. No single choir virtual instrument has managed to deliver a fluid, intuitive and great sounding choir that was capable of singing any words in any language, soft or loud ... until now."

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 4:09 am**

Wow, a paid upgrade to Play? That's new. Play 5 has been working great for me, so I'll pass.

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 4:34 am**

Ah yes, forgot that! Play 6 is indeed a paid upgrade if you don't use the cloud thingie or haven't purchased Hollywood Choirs. From what I understood is that it will be included in any future releases.
Also Nick mentions in the walkthrough video at around the 14 min mark that he uses Spaces 2, which will be released as well soon (no more info)

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:03 am**

I will be writing a review on this for AskAudio but the Play 6 new Database and search feature make it worth the purchase IMHO.

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:12 am**

Ashermusic wrote:I will be writing a review on this for AskAudio but the Play 6 new Database and search feature make it worth the purchase IMHO.Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 6.02.29 AM.png

I was about to agree with you on that until I discovered it also shows all the things you DON"T have installed.... which suddenly makes it annoying as hell to be honest. If it would only show the instruments you have or grey out the ones you don't have installed it would have been great.

Edit: and ohh! while I typed this in frustration and went back to PLAY I saw this tiny box and the bottom right where you can click installed

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:17 am**

Jaap wrote:
Ashermusic wrote:I will be writing a review on this for AskAudio but the Play 6 new Database and search feature make it worth the purchase IMHO.Screen Shot 2017-12-05 at 6.02.29 AM.png
I was about to agree with you on that until I discovered it also shows all the things you DON"T have installed.... which suddenly makes it annoying as hell to be honest. If it would only show the instruments you have or grey out the ones you don't have installed it would have been great.

Edit: and ohh! while I typed this in frustration and went back to PLAY I saw this tiny box and the bottom right where you can click installed

And anyway, so does the UAD plug-ins.

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:32 am**

It does look nice, but the fact that EW are now I believe the only company that charge for the sample player itself (as opposed to a full sampler), the backlash will be loud and inevitable. Count yourself lucky you don't work for them any more, Jay!

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:39 am**

I do, Guy, I do. BTW though if you buy the Choirs or subscribe to the Composer Cloud you get Play 6 for free.

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 12:23 pm**

(Or if you're Jay Asher-just sayin'.)

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 2:28 pm**

Not interested in HC, but Play 6 paid upgrade?, no, i'm still waiting for a fix for more than 5 months with the MIDI learn function broken in Play 5... after all the money spend in EW i need to pay?...pass.

Posted: **Dec 05, 2017 9:33 pm**

Wow, just so happens I "turned on" my Composer's Cloud sub on November 14th. I'd better go download Play 6 before I turn the sub off!

Edit: done!

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 1:46 am**

I'm not even kidding, I think my ears are broken.

I'm not seeing any noticeable difference between this and the old EWQL SC. Granted I have VOTA, the difference is so tiny that I'm so happy I didn't bother to wait around for it. Paolo, you'd better get working on some mean forte staccatos, so I can ditch play 5 before it self destructs

;D

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 2:13 am**

I have no real dog in this hunt anymore but no, they do not sound alike. Here they are with the default mics and the reverbs turned off.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 2:17 am**

jay I know as well as you do, that example was worthless. It's quite clear you just copy pasted the midi, and didn't tweak whatever default WB's you were using.

you could spend a few minutes getting the same quality out of both, that in a mix would be completely interchangeable. Especially with the newer WB profiles, neither are good - but one is worse out of the box

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 2:23 am**

KyleJudkins wrote:jay I know as well as you do, that example was worthless. It's quite clear you just copy pasted the midi, and didn't tweak whatever default WB's you were using.

you could spend a few minutes getting the same quality out of both, that in a mix would be completely interchangeable. Especially with the newer WB profiles, neither are good - but one is worse out of the box

That wasn't my point. The reason I did that is to show that they don't intrinsically sound alike. And think for a moment Kyle. They were recorded what, 10 years apart? One was recorded in a concert hall the other at EW studios with different singers and different mics. How could they sound alike?

Whatever results you think you could get from either was beyond the scope of what I was trying to accomplish. I have no dog in that hunt.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 2:30 am**

its not about sounding alike, it's about sounding interchangeable. 2 seconds of tweaking a default phrase = already playable.

in this case I have it sent to a reverb, but the end product would most likely have some sort of reverb anyways

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3vsqkcicciu6e ... s.mp3?dl=0

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 2:35 am**

basically, I think your example is insanely misleading. It's like(and I have seen this) someone take a solo trumpet patch from something, then line it up with sample modeling - and without changing a single CC, just playing straight on the keyboard with no dynamics. Both sound bad, but one is completely handicapped.

In this case, they spend some time sculpting the default phrases, and most likely smoothed out the velocity weirdness in HC, but nothing that wouldn't be ironed out with a small amount of tweaking... But in this case, you didn't even bother playing the phrase on symphonic choirs, knowing full well the release times ect would be way different. If you'd played both patches 100% blind on a piano they'd both sound like trash lol.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 8:20 am**

Anders Wall wrote:
soundbylaura wrote:I'd better go download Play 6 before I turn the sub off!
Do you get to keep v6 when you turn off the sub. or will it/you revert back to v5?

Best,

Anders

Good question! I'm assuming that 6 will continue working, but I guess I'll find out! :: dun dun dunnnn ::

I will report back after the sub ends.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 9:23 am**

Kyle, you are simply wrong. I have both. You open Symphonic Choirs and load an instrument and start to play it and you will hear a certain sound. You then do the same with Hollywood Choirs and you hear a different sound. That is all I said, my example illustrates it, and that is as far as I am willing to get involved in the discussion. The two sound quite different out of the box, period. I don't work for EW anymore and so I don't care what people believe or decide.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 10:42 am**

Just catching up... Kyle, it's pretty unhelpful imo to say that Jay's A/B is worthless, it clearly isn't. Obviously it shows the spatial difference, and that Hollywood Choirs is much more present especially in the sopranos and altos, but perhaps most significantly there's a lot more vibrato with SC in those ranges, but I'm pretty sure that's not compulsory. More to the point, does HC have more extreme vibrato if required?

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 11:39 am**

Guy Rowland wrote:Just catching up... Kyle, it's pretty unhelpful imo to say that Jay's A/B is worthless, it clearly isn't. Obviously it shows the spatial difference, and that Hollywood Choirs is much more present especially in the sopranos and altos, but perhaps most significantly there's a lot more vibrato with SC in those ranges, but I'm pretty sure that's not compulsory. More to the point, does HC have more extreme vibrato if required?

part of that presence comes from letting the word builder do it's thing. in this case, he performed it in a way that let's HC have all the time it needs between notes for the syllables, but not for symphonic choirs.

jay why do you keep replacing interchangeable with identical? I'm not deaf, I'm saying you could use either for the same need - and no significant improvement to any aspect aside from default phrases if you're totally lost on how to use word builder(or well atleast)

as far sounds actual recording quality, it's a bit better I'm sure(they talked about aiming for noise floor specifically) but the more noticeable difference is that raw - the main mics on HC feels already scooped, while SC sounds slightly more honkey in the mids by comparison.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 11:47 am**

Kyle, you didn't initially make that distinction. You said there was "no noticeable difference."

Your exact words, and empirically wrong. That is all I wanted to address.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 12:01 pm**

Ashermusic wrote:Kyle, you didn't initially make that distinction. You said there was "no noticeable difference."

Your exact words, and empirically wrong. That is all I wanted to address.

if you're going to take me literally to the point that it's useless then by all means. but don't upload an intentionally poor example of 1 library. We've all heard symphonic choirs used well, and you no doubt are capable of making a fairer example

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 12:05 pm**

I have zero interest in making a "fair example." I am not trying to sell libraries.
And yes, Donald Trump notwithstanding, your exact words DO matter.

Read Guy's reply to you. I am now done.

Posted: **Dec 06, 2017 12:17 pm**

Maybe I'll Pony up the money to do a comparison using composer cloud.

I just assumed that the point of discussing this so those of us who don't own it can get an accurate measure of the difference between the two. I'm sure both can produce excellent results, but I'm not convinced the improvements are worth the price if you already own symphonic choirs. This seems to have all of the same strengths and weaknesses of symphonic choirs with minor improvements in areas like miking and default word builder.

Hopefully it's smooth out some of the touching velocity, but would be most useful is actually making the modwheel do something significant

I'm not trying to pick on you J, you are one of the reasons I dumped a crap ton of money in east west products for my first VI purchase after sample tank.

it was STXL -> EWQL SC. -> 2 grand worth of CCC -> komplete.

You've always been insanely helpful, especially when it came to East-West products for obvious reasons, that's why I felt like this was unlike you

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