Vocal VTS plugins - best value for price

Hello musicians,

I’m planning to purchase a choir VST plugin and I’ve been looking around for a library that would give me the best value for money. As those are extremely expensive for me I had to exclude a lot of them. (Life of a hobby-like-composer sucks when they are born in a wrong country.) What I expect is some phrase/word builder, staccato and legato vowels and somewhat good sound of choir ensembles. A bonus would be choir FX and solos.

I narrowed them down to these two: Requiem Light Symphonic Choir ($199) or Voxos which is available for quite a good deal on Big Fish Audio.

Anyone can recommend which one might be better investment? Or you can even throw some other recommendations, but I have put the limit at $250.

Thank you very much!
Mia

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One of my favorites is Performance Samples Oceania, which is incredibly agile and easy to use - but of course, it’s a special tool with certain limitations. And that considered, it’s pretty expensive, even though it is really good at what it does… I was lucky to get it on a substantial sale some time ago, so that does happen.

My “theoretical” favorite would be Hollywood Choirs, because it sounds great, and can sing actual lyrics (phonetic editor + sequencer for timing and level tweaks), but there are two problems with it: Even with the current 60% discount, it’s $320, and it takes quite some effort to actually have it pronounce things correctly. Oh, and you need to write proper lyrics for it to make much sense to put that effort in, of course. (It has lots of preset phrases, but I was not massively impressed with them, honestly. They get significantly more realistic with some tweaking, and I think the developers could have put more effort into that, to really show off the library’s capabilities.)

As for more “traditional” options, 8Dio really know their choirs! Unfortunately, their “official” prices are in the $500+ range - but they regularly have MASSIVE discounts, so you shouldn’t pay anything near that. Requiem Professional is currently on sale for $98, but that’s unfortunately rather old, and perhaps not quite on the same level as the others. (Still sounds amazing, though.) Liberis is $78, but that’s a children’s choir. Silka is also on sale (thinking about picking that up; it’s pretty much the only one of theirs I don’t have yet), but, just like Insolidus, it’s a bit specialized; perhaps not the first choice as a main, all-purpose choir library. Depends on what you’re looking for, though. They’re all amazing in their respective focus areas.

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hello
this is a great quesion because there is a lot of vocal library
if you want a big epic choir with sequencer, phrase editor it will cost money and you have 8dio lacrimosa, storm choir 2 from strezov sampling, oceania from performance sample, mars from soundiron and EW symphonic or hollywood choir , and the big dominus from fluffy audio, these are for me the best and huge library to have it cost a lot but you have a lot of possibilities and powerfull choir under your hand
if you have less money, 8 dio has requiem that is not bad, you can find also :slight_smile:
with soundiron library you will find mercury micro and olympus element that cost each less than 100$, sound great but not so many possibilities
soundiron requiem light, mercury symphonic boychoir and venus sound great but for me must be doubled by another one
Strezov Sampling has also great choir library with Freyja, Rhodope, wotan that cost less than 250$ and arva children choir for nearly 300$ but children choir is very amazing when you mixe up girls and boys choir together wow fantastic.

but before buy a choir library you must define clearly what you want to do with if it is just aaah, Ooooh, Mmmmmmh don’t need to spend a lot, but if you want complexe phrases with great sound and great seuencer it will cost a lot

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I have been looking up and listening overviews of choir plugins whole day and my brain is slowly losing the ability to decide. It is really hard to pick one. What I really want is to have the basic vowels like aah, ohs, and hums, a word builder with latin syllables. It doesnt have to create complex words, it is only to make the choir sing something more realistic than just ohs and ahs :slight_smile: Also, I aim for both staccatos and legatos. I want epic mixed choir.

The hollywood library must be really cool, but well… the price and writing lyrics is also not my strongest side, so it is a bit overkill anyway.
I m listening to Requiem Professional from 8dio and it sounds good. As it seems it has everything I mentioned and the price is really good. Not sure if the fact that it is old make the product “worse” (?)

I guess I ll go for one of those three:
Requiem Professional from 8dio
Requiem Light Symphonic Choir from Soundiron
Voxos Epic Choir from Cinesamples

I know there are better for higher price, there will always be a correlation between the quality and the price, I understand that. But these three are affordable for me. I guess there is no one who would just pick one of them for me? :smiley:

I might as well wait for some massive sale, but I am actually not sure how to keep track of them? There was huge sale from NI back in August, they sold huge bundle of choirs for just 179, I hate myself for missing that :confused:

Thank you all for your input! :slight_smile:

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Well, it’s all very subjective, and it all depends on what you’re going for. 8Dio Requiem is, well, a requiem style library, so I’m not sure it’s the best fit for over-the-top epic, for example (I suppose that’s why the average trailer composer might not be a huge fan of it) - but it does sound amazing IMHO, and it’s really quite advanced technically, so it’s not like it’s an inferior product or anything. Oh, and it has solo singers as well!

Also, note that 8Dio tend to keep updating their libraries, so the old ones aren’t necessarily missing any of the new scripting features etc. They often add new content with updates as well. Requiem is currently at version 1.1, AFAIK.

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I think those words describe best strezov choir wotan (male choir) and freyja (female choir)… what i like the most with those choirs is that you can creat your own words by morphing existant syllables… now there are on sale !

and i found this comment somewhere may be that can help you in your choice:

Well let me say it this way: I have got 8Dio Requiem, Liberis, Lacrimosa, EWQL Symphonic Choirs + VOTA, Soundiron Mercury lite, Performance Samples Oceania, Bestservice Mystica & Cantus, Fluffy Audio Dominus and Strezov Sampling Storm Choir I & II Complete, Tropar, Arva, Wotan, Freyja and Rhodope II.

I started long ago using EWQL Symphonic Choirs as the very first I ever had, then came 8Dio Requiem Pro . While you could get good results with Symphonic Choirs in situations where you just needed a shouting choir behind a large orchestral performance and epic tracks it did not work as a “naked” choir at all. Requiem pro on the other side offered a very good sound and great vowel legato stuff, but the phrasebuilder was far too limited and also too bulky to use. With quite a lot of work you stil can make it sound very well - especially if you only need the vowels. For that it was really good. Also the FX were and stil are useful. Here is a short example that shows EWQL Symphonic Choirs Vota in the first minute and Requiem Pro from minute 1:03 - 1:48.

8Dio Liberis also had a very nice sound and I used the vowel legato and FX quite often in the past - the problem with the limited phrasebuilder was the same as in Requiem Pro. Here an example how nice the vowel legato worked:

From my other choir libraries I especially liked Bestservice´s / Tarilonte´s Mystica Female (medieval) Women´s Choir which had very nice legato. It also had limitations but for a more ancient sound without legato (which I needed in many medieval / celtic inspired tracks) this is exactly what you need and for that it is stil my library to go:
Medieval Sacred Demo

Atonal Avantgard Demo

Later I purchased 8Dio´s Lacrimosa mostly because of Michal Cielecki´s awesome demo and the marketing, but I have to confess that the product really disappointed me. What I liked where the fast Syllab combinations, but the normal legato was absolutely not of my liking and I also found that due the totally excessive number of singers the choir sound looses all its nice details which makes it sound even weaker than a choir with just 20 singers - its simple psycho-acoustics.

Now here I found out about Strezov Sampling and their Storm Choir I and II aswell about their Tropar. After listening to the great SC II demo by Adam Hochstatter I purchased SC II and was quite happy with it. Later i went for SC I once it was on Sale at I think vstbuzz and found out that I liked SC I even more than SC II because it works so well just right out of the box. You can write fast passages (not as fast as with Oceania but stil very fast) and also lyrical passages. A true timesaver and a very helpful and inspiring tool. The auto-syllab option aswell as the stacking was very nice. I am stil using this one. Here is a track that i have written featuring SC I for a micro-job (the solo voices in that track are the ethereal voice from Tarilonte´s Forest Kingdom II and ERA II Vocal Codex).

After that I purchased Wotan and was really blown away by it´s great sound and usability. Here is a track where I tested it on different criteria: Playability, sound standalone, sound in orchestral context, word building (lending the consonants from SC II).

Because I liked Wotan that much I decided to go for Freyja and Arva aswell - especially after listening to Oschmann´s, Raynaud´s and Hochstatter´s Demos for these libraries. I didn´t regret these purchases. Maybe expensive but very, VERY NICE! I also purchased Rhodope II because for ethnic stuff this is just a nice alternatice to the normal sounding choirs. Its just more ancient and raw with it´s throat singing style tressenet (or how that is written).

For ecclesiastic and sacred / classical projects I decided to get Fluffy Audio´s Dominus . I haven´t got a track written that I can show but damn - very nice and for this kind of project just incredible. Here is a demo by Morten Lauridsen.

The last choir that I purchased was Performance Samples´s Oceania . While this choir IMO has got quite some flaws it works very well for what it is made for: Expressive and very fast and energetic singing right out of the box. So even I was not ULTRA impressed I respect that choir a lot because it is very strong in fast passages and its high amount of vibrato can really kick ass in special situations.

So my final conclusion on choirs is:
I am not using Mercury, Liberis and Lacrimosa at all and Cantus extremely seldom. I very rarely use EWQL Symphonic Choirs (besides I really have to write lyrics. I know the engine and vst very well and know how to program with it. I stil try to avoid it because IMO the sound is not up to date anymore and it takes too much time working with it until everything sounds ok), Storm Choir II (even it´s good, but for quick writing i prefer SC I and for the more complex stuff i prefer the next generation choirs Freyja, Arva and Wotan). I am using Mystica often when it comes to medieval / celtic and I am also not using Oceania a lot - just if i need these fast passages or something that cuts through the mix when having a large orchestra performing.

Means: Out of all these choirs I am mostly using Arva, Freyja, Wotan and Dominus. These are THE most convincing options these days IMHO.

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Souleymane, wow, that comment was super helpful! I have quite a good overview about choir plugins now, so, Thank you! :relaxed:

I had another round of listening various libraries after a short break and I’ve decided to buy Requiem Professional, I like the sound and even liked the technical walk-through. Also, it is quite cheap, so in case I will still lack some choirs I can still decide for something else and/or wait for some exclusive offer that pops up. Thank you all for your inputs!

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if you have enough time there is a big promo on 8dio requiem pro 88$ instead of 588$ !!!

https://8dio.com/instrument/requiem-professional/

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Yes that’s the one I m going to buy! :slight_smile:

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it is a very good choice you will have a great vocal choir library with solo

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Cool! Glad to hear it! I can’t wait to try it out. Might use it for this month contest if the Christmas won’t be too much time and energy consuming :blush:

Just seen NI have an offer on SOUNDIRON VOCAL SUITE
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/specials/komplete/soundiron-offer-2019/

Not sure whether to go for this or 8dios Requiem - could do with vocal/choral stuff as I haven’t really got any.

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Damn missed the 8dio offer- don’t know whether to see what else they have on offer up to Christmas - has anyone used the Soundiron libraries and are they any good?

The Requiem is first I own from them and I havent had a chance to try it out yet… But David mentioned above, they have good choirs. :slight_smile: I think they will put another sale on choirs again, it’s just pain in the ass to wait for those sales and notice! So really thanks for the link to the NI offer, I am actually thinking about buying that choral suite too. Really good price!:blush:
Those Christmas sales will make me broke :face_with_hand_over_mouth::grin:

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