Best Choir VST?
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Are you looking for a great choir VST plugin for your music compositions?
The human voice can truly add soul and character in music.
Anything from the deep bass of male choirs, to divine female choirs, and gentle children choirs.
In this quick guide I have compiled a list of great choir VST libraries:
Choir VST libraries – Top List
- Hollywood Choirs (EastWest)
- Mars Symphonic Men’s Choir (Soundiron)
- Venus Symphonic Women’s Choir (Soundiron)
- Mercury Symphonic Boys’ Choir (Soundiron)
- StormChoir 2 – (Strezov Sampling)
- Wotan Male Choir (Strezov Sampling)
- Freyja Female Choir (Strezov Sampling)
- Arva Children’s Choir ((Strezov Sampling)
- Genesis Children’s Choir (AudioBro)
- Eric Whitacre Choir (Spitfire Audio)
- Dominus Choir (Fluffy Audio)
Hello Composers! =)
My name is Mike, founder of professionalcomposers.com, music composer and sound designer since 1998, old school nerd, and coffee addict. So grab a cup of coffee, and let’s check out some amazing Choir VST Libraries! =)
Hollywood Choirs is my favorite product inside all of the EastWest Composer Cloud range. It simply sounds amazing, and the dynamic range is incredible. And with the nice convolution reverb included you feel like you are in heaven.
My Favorite Highlights
- Amazing Dynamic Range
- Super Powerful Wordbuilder
- Very Lush and Rich Sound
Mars Symphonic Men’s Choir includes an extensive range of sounds and combinations for your choice. Latin, Slavonic, and lots of vowel combinations. You get sustains, marcatos, staccatos, true legato patches, and even special presets like clusters, falls etc. If you need a powerful men’s choir, Mars will deliver.
My Favorite Highlights
- Marcato/Staccato Phrase Builder
- Both Latin and Slavonic
- 5 True Legato Vowels
- Bonus Soloist Range
Venus Symphonic Women’s Choir is part of the Olympus product range. Recorded in the same church as Mars Symphonic Men’s Choir, with 33 amazing female singers. The natural ambience is hauntingly beautiful, and you get great control over the layering and combinations of the complete choir sound.
My Favorite Highlights
- Marcato/Staccato Phrase Builder
- Both Latin and Slavonic
- 4 Dynamic Layered PP/FF True Legato Vowels
- Bonus Soloist Range
Mercury Symphonic Boy Choir will give you the traditional sound of an English boy’s choir, from lyrical legatos, to marcatos and staccatos with latin syllables and words. The bonus pads, drone, soundscapes and whisper articulations truly shows how deep this choir library is.
My Favorite Highlights
- The Word Master System (key switching)
- Combined Marcato/Staccato Phrase Builder
- 42 staccato & 42 sustaining marcato syllables with round-robin
- 6 dynamic true legato vowels
A 12-piece chamber choir recorded with seven different mic positions featuring a great phrasebuilder with Slavonic syllables. It even includes true legato patches for both men and women. If you want an epic choir library, StormChoir 2 will deliver big time.
My Favorite Highlights
- Seven Mic Positions
- Stack (Overdub) functionality
- Phrasebuilder with 24 deeply sampled matching syllables
- True Legato Patches for both Men and Women
Wotan is a male choir that is inspired by the classic LOTR soundtrack in the mines of Moria. Big, bombastic, deep and powerful. With polyphonic legato, a very wide register, and a phrase-builder that is actually super quick and easy to use.
My Favorite Highlights
- The Syllabuilder engine with Connect and Morph modes
- The Agile Legato Engine
- Separate recordings of ten tenors and ten basses
- 3 mic positions – Close, Decca, Hall
- Polyphonic True Legato (Ah, Mm and Oh)
Freyja is the female counter part to the Wotan male choir. Play agile legato and even polyphonic legato on every syllable, with the breathtaking beauty and power of 10 altos and 10 sopranos. Freyja delivers a wide range in both pitch and dynamics, and more importantly, lots of expression.
My Favorite Highlights
- The Syllabuilder engine with Connect and Morph modes
- The Agile Legato Engine
- Separate recordings of ten altos and ten sopranos
- 3 mic positions – Close, Decca, Hall
- Polyphonic True Legato (Ah, Mm, MmAh)
Arva gives you that light-hearted and beautiful voice of a children’s choir. It consists of two separately recorded sections of boys and girls. The power of polyphonic legato, true divisi and the Syllabuilder engine will give you incredible control over the expression.
My Favorite Highlights
- True Divisi recordings for boys and girls sections
- Separately recorded boys and girls choir ensembles
- Polyphonic True Legato (Ah, Mm, Ooh, Mm-Ah, Mm-Ooh, Mm-Ooh-Ah)
- The Syllabuilder engine
4 fantastic children’s choir sections in one beautiful and easy to use interface. This will give you instant inspiration to shape the sound, tone and expression of new choir parts for your music. Genesis truly delivers high end quality in all aspects.
My Favorite Highlights
- 4 choirs in 1 (Soprano + Alto Girls, Soprano + Alto Boys)
- Programmable Latin based phrases
- Polyphonic Real Legato and melisma
- Auto Divisi engine
- 3D Stage panner
- Komplete Kontrol Integration
Recorded in the Lyndhurst Hall at Air Studios, and conducted by Grammy winner Eric Whitacre. This choir library will give you access to the highest quality singers, in a wonderful hall. The choir consists of 22 singers: six soprano, five alto, five tenor and six bass. And don’t let the simplicity of the interface fool you, this is one massive and magnificent choir.
My Favorite Highlights
- Massive Library (170GB)
- 22 singers performing 170 techniques in total
- 111 Evolutions
- The Big Knob (customizable)
Dominus Choir has a very classical and warm sound, with amazing expression in the dynamic range. The interface and wordbuilder is extremely easy and inspiring to work with, and you will soon be making those big, lush choir parts for your music compositions.
My Favorite Highlights
- Easy and Powerful Phrasebuilder
- True-legato transitions for all the vowels in the library
- Polylegato engine
- Intelligent auto-connect of syllables
- Metropolis Ark 1
A full orchestral library, which includes both men’s and women’s choir presets. - 8dio Choirs
8dio have several choirs in their product range like: Silka, Insolidus, Requiem, Lacrimosa and Liberis.
Best Choir VST libraries – Summary
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Introduction
Writing VST plugins is a lot of fun, but it’s even more fun to write your own host which uses the wide variety of plugins already out there to do something original and new. Making your own VST host is not a trivial task, but the trickiest part is figuring out how to load the plugins and connect them to your code’s callback functions. As the VST documentation is a bit sparse on the subject of hosting, this guide will assist you in setting up your own host.
This guide only covers loading the plugin and basic communication, and the language of choice here is C++. C# programmers should consider using the VST.NET framework, and I’m not sure what frameworks exist for other languages.
Also, it’s worth noting that Teragon Audio has developed an open-source VST host, MrsWatson. Feel free to look at the code and fork it for your own project! If you find yourself using a substantial portion of the MrsWatson source in your own code, please let me know so I can add a link to your project from the MrsWatson page.
Code conventions
In the course of your development, you will probably require logging, error handling, etc. To simplify the code in this tutorial, I have simply written “return -1” or “return NULL” statements, but you should consider expanding this to log some info or handle the error.
Also, this tutorial is written for both Windows and Mac OSX developers. As such, there is a lot of platform-specific code, which you will probably need to box with #ifdef/#endif statements in the preprocessor.
Setting up your build environment
You’ll need to first download and install the following tools:
- Steinberg’s VST SDK, which requires you to make a free Steinberg Developer account. This tutorial assumes you are working with the VST 2.4 SDK.
- Microsoft’s Visual C++ 2010 Express, if you wish to support Windows.
- Microsoft’s Platform SDK, again if you are developing on Windows.
- Xcode 4.x, if you are developing on Mac OS X.
Project configuration
Aside from your project files, you need only to add the VST SDK headers into your project’s include path. This includes the following files, which are located under the vstsdk2.4/pluginterfaces/vst2.x directory:
- aeffect.h
- aeffectx.h
- vsfxstore.h
Build Vst Plugins
On both Windows and Mac OSX, you should probably configure your program to build as a 32-bit binary, simply because most VST plugins are not 64-bit compatible yet. On the Mac, this gets to be a bit hairy because Apple is working to deprecate Carbon, which is a 32-bit framework. If anyone out there has example code in C (not objective-C) to load a plugin from bundle without using Carbon, please let me know so I can update this article.
Loading the VST plugin
After your host performs its own internal initialization routines, it is time to load the VST plugin from source. This procedure varies a bit depending on the platform, but the algorithm is fundamentally the same: find the plugin, load the dynamic library into memory, acquire the plugin’s main address, and create a VST callback connection. These callbacks are defined function pointers which you should define in one of your project’s header files, and are as follows:
On Windows, VST plugins are simply dynamically linked libraries (DLL’s). The code for opening a DLL library in Windows is fairly simple:
On Mac OSX, VST plugins are also dynamic libraries, but they are packaged as bundles. Your host can open these bundles through the Carbon API. On Mac OS9, VST plugins were packaged as CFM files, which has long since been deprecated, and it is highly unlikely that any modern VST host should need to support this format.
The procedure for opening a plugin under OSX is a bit more complex, but the code should be fairly straightforward. Keep in mind that although a VST plugin can be loaded from any location on disk, they are usually stored in either /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST or $HOME/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST.
Anyways, to load the VST plugin on Mac OSX, that will look something like this:
Write Vst Plugin C++
You need to keep the bundle pointer around until the host is ready to unload the plugin. At this point, you call CFBundleUnloadExecutable and then CFRelease on the bundle’s reference.
Setting up plugin callbacks
At this point, you should now have successfully loaded the plugin into memory, and you can now establish the plugin dispatcher callbacks:
Plugin initialization
At this point, the plugin should be ready to go, so you can initialize it through the dispatcher handle created in the previous step:
Suspending and resuming
Write Vst Plugin Java
Calling the plugin’s suspend and resume methods are a bit counter-intuitive, and are done like this:
Plugin capabilities
The VST protocol uses “canDo” strings to define plugin capabilities, the most common of which are defined in audioeffectx.cpp in the PlugCanDos namespace near the top of the file. To ask a plugin if it supports one of these capabilities, make the following dispatcher call:
Host capabilities
The plugin can also ask the host if it supports a given capability, which is done through the hostCallback() function defined above. The implementation of this file looks something like this:
The full list of opcodes is defined in aeffect.h (for the VST 1.x protocol) and aeffectx.h (for VST 2.x protocol). There are a lot of opcodes, and your application doesn’t need to support them all, but you will soon figure out which ones are the most important through trial and error. Depending on the nature of the opcall, you will either be required to return a given integer value, call a method in the plugin’s dispatcher, or fill the *ptr pointer with some type of data. The VST SDK header files have fairly good documentation specifying what you need to do depending on the opcode.
The MrsWatson source code also contains an example implementation of this function with the most common opcode cases.
Processing audio
In the VST SDK 2.4, processReplacing() became the new standard call. You may have to add in support to your host for the old style of process() plugins, though there aren’t so many plugins out there which still do this. To have the plugin process some audio:
In the above code, there is an inputs and outputs array which should be initialized by your application as soon you have calculated the desired channel count and buffer size. You should not allocate the inputs and outputs arrays in the processAudio() function, as doing so may severely impact performance. Hence, the call to initializeIO() should be made as soon as possible and before the first call to processAudio(). You should also take care to properly initialize the data in both the inputs and outputs array to zero, or else you can get static or other random noise in the processed signal.
Sending MIDI messages
Processing MIDI events is very similar to processing audio:
The above events array should be allocated and properly initialized by the host to contain the MIDI events which the plugin will receive. The VstEvent structure is defined in aeffectx.h, and there you will also find the respective VstEvent types, all of which are deprecated except for kVstMidiType and kVstSysExType.
Note that the plugin must support the receiveVstMidiEvent canDo in order to process MIDI.
Final Notes
At this point, you should have a basic working host capable of loading and communicating with a VST plugin. As you continue your development, take care to thoroughly read the VST SDK header files and other associated documentation, as they will provide you with further hints as to the correct implementation. Also, you should take time to create good logging facilities in your host, particularly in the hostCallback() method, as most plugin incompatibilities are usually triggered from some error there.
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