Ever fancied arranging 'Oops, I Did It Again' for a full choir? Well now you can, courtesy of Symphonic Choirs, the latest virtual-instrument sample library from East West and Quantum Leap. While the sample world seems to be overflowing with quality orchestral libraries, the same is not true for the obvious complement to the orchestra — the choir. Admittedly, choral music is a somewhat more specialised genre but, for film and media composers in particular, the use of choral parts is a common requirement. Way back in 1997, Spectrasonics' five-disc Akai/Emu Symphony of Voices library set the standard for sampled choral sounds.

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It fully deserves its 'classic' status and can still be regularly heard in film and TV music. Of course, sample technology has moved on considerably since that time, and competing products have subsequently appeared. One of these is Quantum Leap's Voices Of The Apocalypse, a four-disc Gigasampler library that got a five-star Sample Shop review from Mark Wherry back in October 2002. Again, VOTA has proved a popular library, and it also included one unique feature — the ability to 'build' words from the comprehensive sample set that consists of every consonant and vowel sound for both the male and female choirs. Despite being capable of some excellent results, one of the criticisms levelled at VOTA was that the word-building process was rather clunky in operation.

Driver Improvement Course In Woodbridge Va. QL's new release, produced in collaboration with East West, is Symphonic Choirs, and, as well as being the largest choral library currently available (nine DVD-ROM disks containing over 38 Gigabytes of sample data), it comes with a dedicated application for turning text into sung phrases, the appropriately named Word Builder. This application has been written by Nuno Fonseca, who also developed the word-building utility for VOTA.

As with other major releases from East West/Quantum Leap in recent months, Symphonic Choirs is available for both Mac and PC using Native Instrument's Kompakt as the playback front-end. So, providing you are not a member of a professional choir, is Symphonic Choirs a good thing? The Symphonic Choirs package consists of three elements: NI's Kompakt, the extensive sample library and the Word Builder application. There is little to say about the first of these that hasn't already been covered in SOS. Just as it was when supplied with Colossus and RA, which I looked at in recent issues of SOS, Kompakt is a cut-down version of NI's flagship Kontakt software sampler, and the Symphonic Choirs samples set can only be used with the dedicated version supplied here, or the full version of one of NI's software samplers. It's worth mentioning that you need a DVD drive for the installation, plus of course that slim-and-trim 38GB of hard disk space to put the library in. In terms of host computer specification, East West recommend that you own a minimum 3GHz Pentium III or Athlon-based PC running Windows XP, or a 1.8GHz Mac G5 running OS 10.2.6 or later, with a minimum of 2GB of RAM on either platform.

The sample library itself can also be divided into three components; a series of Kontakt Multis for each of the five choir sections (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass and Boys), individual Kompakt Instruments for the same five sections and Kompakt Instruments for three soloists (Soprano, Alto and Boy Soprano). In principle, the two sets of individual Instrument Programs are similar to more typical choir-based sample libraries in that they offer various performance combinations including vowel sounds, consonant sounds, vibrato, staccato and a selection of special effects such as whispers, falls and shouts. Many of the Programs include velocity and mod wheel control of the sound for extra expressive options, while the three soloists all have key-switched performance articulations available within their Programs, as you can see from the screenshot at the head of this article, which shows a soloist Program loaded. The blue keys contain the samples, while the brown keys select the key-switched performance articulations. The section Multis really come into play with third element of the overall package, Word Builder. This sits between the normal MIDI data input (the melody of the line to be sung) and the Kompakt Multi.