Best Orchestral Percussion Libraries 2021 Every band needs a rhythm section, just like every orchestra needs its percussion. Here we are going to take a look at some of the most popular orchestral percussion libraries you can use in your template. When we talk about orchestral percussion we are talking…
Best Choir Libraries 2021
Now that we have our orchestral sections in order, it’s time to take care of the final part of your orchestral template. No epic orchestra is complete without a choir, so it is up to us to suggest to you some great choir sample libraries for that epic drama. Here we go!
Strezov Sampling – Choir Essentials
The name says it all. It’s the most essential elements you will ever need from a choir library. You have both male and female vocalists as well as children. All of them divided into performance and legato patches. Basses, Tenors, Altos, Sopranos, children altos and sopranos. That’s it, and you don’t need anything more than that to start your choral adventure.
Like all the other Strezov choir libraries, this one features polyphonic legato. The intelligent voice leading enables polyphonic legato in a single patch. In other words, all you need to do is to hold a chord with one hand and play the melody with the other. You just have to use the sustain pedal in order to enable it. Easy as that.
This collection is a perfect entry point for upstarting composers who need a solid choir library that can cover a lot of ground. It’s a ready-to-go library for almost every situation that requires a choir. For 149 Euros and 12GBs of samples this Kontakt library is a no brainer.
EastWest – Hollywood Choirs
Building up on the success of Symphonic Choirs and Word Builder engine, EastWest have completed their Hollywood series of instruments with Hollywood Choirs in order to complement their Hollywood Orchestra. This is the instrument that won the 2019 NAMM TEC award as the best music software instrument for that year.
The masterminds at EastWest were the first ones to stir the pot with their Word Builder Engine that enables the choir to sing actual words that you type into it and it recognizes Latin, German, English, Italian and Spanish. It does have a learning curve to it but once you’ve learned how to use it you’re in for a treat!
As is the tradition of EastWest Hollywood series, this library sounds simply spectacular. You get both male and female ensembles and if you are a user of Choirs Diamond library you get up to 13 mic positions to create your own custom mix.
In order to use this library, as is the situation with all the other EastWest instruments, you will need to use PLAY 6 engine. The size of samples varies between versions (59GB for diamond, 16 GB for gold, etc..). Depending on the version, the price range varies.
8Dio – Silka Choir
Another great choral product in the vast offer by 8dio is Silka. This is truly an epic choir library that can sound both soft and dramatic so it can cover a lot of ground. In 8Dio’s own testimony this choir library is a powerful instrument for even the largest of compositions that covers the true emotion and motion of choral writing.
The choir is made of 40 male and 25 female singers hand-picked by master conductor Petr Polonanik. It’s the same group of singers that was used for 8Dio’s previous choir library called Insolidus. Sound-wise it’s recorded very well with up to 8 mic positions and it features a lot of articulations with syllables, as well as polyphonic legato for ah, uh and all the other traditional choral samples.
Silka features an advanced phrase-building engine that enables you to connect up to 64 syllables in a sequence. What’s great about this library is that it adapts itself to your DAW tempo so that it makes the sequencer extra usable. If you want to own Silka you will need around 50GB of space on your HDD and it will cost you almost $600.
Soundiron – Olympus Symphonic Choir
Olympus choir collection is actually comprised of Soundiron’s flagship choir libraries Mars and Venus. Mars features male singers whilst Venus features female singers.
In collaboration with Maestro Robert Geary, Mars and Venus were recorded at Montclair Presbyterian, high in the forested hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay with a 63-voice hand-picked group of SF Symphony Chorus, SF Opera, SF Choral Society and Volti singers.
Both Mars and Venus include a pair of wide stereo mic positions (stage/close and hall/far) so you can customize your sound.
This collection features 33 male singers and 30 female singers along with 8 soloists. What’s interesting about this library is that besides Latin phrases it also features Slavic phrases so you can simulate orthodox chants for that eastern European sound and it is the only library so far that has this feature.
Apart from all the legatos and phrases this choir collection also features various sound FX and drones created with human voice. At 45GB, this collection comes at a price of $550 which is a good bargain if you compare it to the price of buying Mars and Venus individually.
