As technology advances, it becomes increasingly easier for producers and composers to create realistic and expressive music with virtual instruments. Choir VST plugins have seen significant growth in quality and popularity over the years. With a top-tier choir plugin, you can create beautiful, lifelike choir sounds with ease, without the need for a large group of vocalists. In this blog post, we'll take a look at some of the best choir VST plugins available.
Best Service's Mystica
Best Service's Mystica is a unique virtual instrument library, designed primarily for solo use but can also form a mixed choir when combined with Cantus, another library by the same creator.
Part of Eduardo Tarilonte's vocal libraries, Mystica features a classical chamber choir of eight extraordinary female vocalists, delivering an enchanting and versatile sound that suits both esoteric melodies and grand cinematic passages.
It's noted for its "True Legato" and its ability to create impressively realistic choir phrases through a powerful wordbuilder, which combines 24 words into 120 elements, including five True-Legato vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and an additional “Mmmh“-articulation.
The library also offers 100 Gregorian vocal phrases for creating sacral atmospheres, twelve soundscapes molded from vocal recordings, and additional vocal effects for generating unique sounds.
With the combination of Mystica and Cantus, you can create an extensive palette of choir sounds, making it an invaluable tool for music producers, composers, and sound designers. Whether scoring for film, television, or video games, or crafting unique music tracks, Mystica's flexibility and realism can significantly enhance your compositions.
8Dio's Requiem Professional
8Dio's Requiem Professional is a next-generation virtual choir library designed for professional composers. It includes over 15,500 samples from a full choir, male/female divisi, and five solo singers, each with different microphone positions for nuanced control.
The library provides a wide array of articulations including true legato intervals, sustains, staccatos, ultra-forte marcato, and tempo-synced Latin chants. It also hosts over 1,000 choral effects, enabling composers to introduce unique elements into their creations, such as body percussion sounds, consonant sounds, sweeps, trills, and more.
The Requiem Professional excels in delivering lifelike choral pieces with its smooth and realistic true legato sustains, which come in "Ah," "Eh," and "Oh" articulation groups. When used in conjunction with the Requiem multi-vowels/poly-sustains, composers can craft fully-realistic choral compositions.
This library is best suited for professional composers and music producers who work in the domains of film, television, and video games, or for anyone looking to enrich their compositions with a high-quality, diverse choral sound.
Soundiron's Olympus Symphonic Choir
Soundiron's Olympus Symphonic Choir is an industry-leading virtual choir instrument that runs in Steinberg's HALion Sonic player. It's known for its realistic and dynamic replication of a large 63-piece symphonic choir. This digital instrument brings to life the power of a full mixed choir, divided into four sections: sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.
Known for its robust articulation features, the Olympus Symphonic Choir offers a True Legato mode, which provides smooth and realistic transitions between notes, and meticulously recorded multiple dynamic levels ranging from pianissimo to fortissimo. The choral library also includes a comprehensive range of Latin and Slavonic (church Slavonic) syllable sets, empowering users to create realistic lyrics in a variety of styles.
The Olympus Symphonic Choir is best suited for composers, musicians, and sound designers who require a comprehensive, versatile, and high-quality choral sound for their projects. This could range from film and game scoring, where the choir can be used to add epic, dramatic elements, to concert compositions that demand a large and dynamic choir.
Olympus Symphonic Choir's range of articulations and syllable sets also make it suitable for more experimental uses, where unique and unconventional choral sounds might be required. This tool is a valuable addition to the arsenal of any music professional who is looking to leverage the majestic and profound effects a choir can bring to a musical piece.
Spitfire Audio's Eric Whitacre Choir
Spitfire Audio's Eric Whitacre Choir is a unique and powerful virtual instrument designed to capture the sound and spirit of the choral works of Eric Whitacre, one of the most acclaimed modern choral composers.
This software features a meticulously sampled choir of singers from the Grammy-winning Eric Whitacre Singers. The Eric Whitacre Choir offers a comprehensive range of vocal sounds, including ethereal whispers, soaring legato lines, and majestic swells, among others.
The Eric Whitacre Choir comes with a wide range of articulations and dynamic layers, as well as a powerful set of performance controls that allow users to shape the sound in real-time. Additionally, the plugin is NKS compatible which provides extra hands-on control if you own a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol keyboard.
Overall, the Spitfire Audio Eric Whitacre Choir is a beautiful virtual instrument that offers an unparalleled level of realism, versatility, and expressiveness, making it an essential tool for composers, producers, and arrangers working in any genre. Watch the following video to see how Eric Whitacre uses this plugin in his productions.
Strezov Sampling's STORM CHOIR Ultimate
Strezov Sampling's STORM CHOIR Ultimate is a highly refined and powerful virtual instrument choir library for Kontakt, celebrated as Strezov Sampling's most popular product ever. It features a 20-piece chamber choir recorded with three microphone positions in the esteemed Sofia Session Studio.
The library offers new recordings within the Syllabuilder engine, providing unprecedented control over syllables, morphing, word creation, and polyphonic true legato. STORM CHOIR Ultimate was designed with larger ensembles than its predecessor, with 10 singers per section (men/women) for the syllables and 6 singers per section for the legatos. The library is known for its exaggerated vibrato and loud, impactful performance, offering 24 syllables of Storm Choir 2 re-recorded in three dynamic layers.
STORM CHOIR Ultimate comes with a performance patch, delivering epic-sounding choir lines with exceptional playability, maintaining an organic and raw tone. It includes the Syllabuilder Engine 3.5, which combines the simplicity of phrasebuilding with the advanced editing functions of wordbuilding.
The library includes true legato patches that can be played polyphonically. Furthermore, the library has a total of 8 soloists with unique timbres and a dedicated FX section featuring whispers, shouts, clusters, risers and falls. These features offer a blend of simple usability and depth of control, making it a powerful tool for creating compelling choral music.
Heavyocity's Mosaic Voices
Heavyocity's Mosaic Voices is a unique virtual instrument library for Kontakt that offers an innovative take on the human voice. The library features both organic male and female choirs, synthesized vocal pads, and intricate noise and drone layers that facilitate the creation of inspiring sounds and rich, dynamic movement.
Mosaic Voices is designed to cater to a wide range of musical genres, providing everything from epic and intimate, synthetic to soulful, and delivering a full palette of vocal sources developed specifically for modern scores. The library includes more than 130 carefully-crafted snapshot presets that serve as excellent starting points for composers, offering both vibrant, organic vocal recordings and synthetic vocals that expand your sonic possibilities.
The power of Mosaic Voices lies in the innovative Mosaic Engine, which allows for thrilling layered combinations of vocal content. The engine supports the creation of varied soundscapes, from rhythmic and lyrical to sparse and emotional.
Given its extensive capabilities and broad spectrum of vocal sources, Mosaic Voices is best suited for modern composers, especially those working in the realms of film, TV, and video game scoring. Its rich and diverse sound palette also makes it a valuable asset for music producers and sound designers looking to add unique, cinematic vocal elements to their projects.
EastWest's Hollywood Choirs
EastWest's Hollywood Choirs is a sophisticated virtual instrument library aimed at creating realistic choir sounds. Designed to deliver cinematic polish, the library utilizes advanced word-building tools, enabling the creation of a myriad of vocal effects.
Hollywood Choirs is broken down into two sections, men's and women's, with each covering a wide vocal range. By using the WordBuilder, users can type in any words, which the choir will then reproduce with a degree of intelligibility.
The library also offers a rich variety of vowel sounds, with patches for sustained 'aa', 'ah', 'ee', 'eh', 'eu', 'ih', 'oh', 'oo', and 'uh'. These are primarily sung without vibrato, yielding a clear sound with dynamic layers ranging from a whisper to a roar.
EastWest's Hollywood Choirs library also includes a Consonants folder, which contains separate patches for each pitched consonant, a patch of breath noises, and one patch of non-pitched consonants. The pitched consonants offer unique textures by continuing to sustain after the initial consonant has been sounded.
Although each sustained vowel is contained within its own unique patch, vowel crossfading is achievable through the WordBuilder interface. However, it's important to note that this function must be pre-programmed and embedded within a WordBuilder text sequence, as real-time, spontaneous performance is not supported.
Given the library's versatility and wide range of choir sounds, it's an excellent choice for music producers, composers, and musicians, particularly those working in cinematic contexts.
In conclusion, choir VST plugins provide composers and producers with powerful tools to create realistic and expressive choral sounds. From the cutting-edge technology of EastWest Hollywood Choirs to hybrid sounds of Mosaic Voices, there are now a variety of options available to suit any production need or style. Whether you're a seasoned composer or a beginner, these choir VST plugins offer a streamlined way to add realistic and inspiring choral sounds to your music.
