Hollywood Choirs Diamond Edition

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Autumn 2018 / COMPUTER MUSIC / 101

mini reviews / reviews <

EastWest

Hollywood Choirs Diamond Edition $799

A rapid-ire round-up of sample libraries, ROMplers and music gear

mini reviews

Web www.sonoelements.com

Format PC/Mac, VST/AU

A virtual take on the Mellotron (the Birmingham-

built tape-based ancestor of the sampler, made

most famous by the lutes in The Beatles’

Strawberry Fields Forever

), eTron packs 200MB

of samples into Sono Elements’ proprietary

sample playback engine. You get seven of the

’Tron’s best-known sounds – Cello, Strings, Choir

(Women), Woodwinds, Brass, Flute and Choir

(Men) – selected using previous/next buttons.

The lack of a menu for instant selection is

irritating. With the exception of Choir (Men),

which loops endlessly when held, each sound

extends for the full eight seconds, delivering the

authentic release ‘drop’ of the real thing. We

wonder if there’s an issue with Choir (Women),

though, as it only lasts six seconds and cuts of

very abruptly – clearly not how it should be.

The looping thing is strange, too: we’re

mystiied as to why we can’t set all sounds to

loop like Choir (Men) – and why Choir (Men)

can’t be set to

not

loop, not that that matters.

Anyhow, there’s an ADSR

envelope onboard for shaping the

amplitude proile within the eight

seconds, while the misnamed

Tremolo efect is actually an auto-

panner, and not a particularly good

one at that, thanks largely to its

unsynced but nonetheless stepped

Rate control.

Further efects include a

tastefully short reverb, a gentle low-

pass ilter, and three lavours of

noise: Vinyl, Tape and Hum. Vinyl

and Hum give you plenty of range,

from very quiet through to

excessively dominant, and are both

thoroughly convincing, but Tape is

far too loud even at its lowest

setting – it needs recalibrating.

There are a few small niggles in

there, then, but assuming that these

can be addressed in an update, the eTron makes

for a good and highly afordable source of

Mellotron sounds.

The playback engine is decidedly basic, but

then, that’s to be expected at this price, and the

samples have been well captured.

n 7 / 1 0 n

Web www.soundsonline.com

Format PC/Mac, VST/AU/standalone

Built on 59GB of 24-bit multisamples of separate

male and female choirs, and running in version

6 of EastWest’s own Play engine (plugin and

standalone), Hollywood Choirs is evidently

targeted at the professional composer market,

and even the most cursory of explorations

quickly reveals it to be an incredibly high-quality

choral ‘construction’ tool. The basic patches

consist of 36 vowels and consonants for each

gender, including staccato, legato and vibrato

options, plus breath and unpitched consonants.

Consonants have two dynamic layers, while

vowels have three, and the mod wheel is used to

crossfade between them. The Main 13-mic array

can be broken down into Close, Stage, audience-

perspective and ambience mixes for discrete

levelling and panning.

The recently improved WordBuilder phrase

design interface is quite remarkable. Load the

Male or Female WB Multi preset, type in some

text for conversion to Phonetic and Votox (or

enter either of those two formats directly), and

the engine will do a generally very impressive

job of having the choir sing it

back to you, stepping through the

constituent syllables with each

new note. It’s by no means perfect

– as expected – but the system

ofers deep manipulation and

balancing of letters, syllables and

phonemes, and with a bit of work

it really is possible to get your

virtual choir singing intelligible

phrases. A useful library of preset

lines in English, Latin, Italian,

Spanish and German is included:

“Blood will run”, “Listen to the

wind”, er, “Necromancer drinks

from the heart of darkness”… that

sort of thing.

The lack of solo choir sections

is a negative – it’s very much all or

nothing in that sense – and

manually combining vowel and

consonant patches across

multiple channels isn’t the fastest of worklows

when not using WordBuilder, but Hollywood

Choirs is still a knockout choral library for movie

and game composers.

The less expensive ($665) Gold version is also

worth considering while you’re there,

incidentally, ofering just the main mic mix at

16-bit quality in 8GB of samples.

n 9 / 1 0 n

Sono Elements

eTron $19