All In the tests

208 Connected   /   Login   /   Register !

The last instrument in this review, Voices Of Passion, features the voices of five female singers from USA, Wales, Syria, India and Bulgaria (7.3 GB of sounds). Once more, the overall sound quality is second to none. The recordings have been made in stereo, with a Telefunken Ela-M 251 tube mic and a RCA 44 ribbon mic. You can choose either one, or use both without any phase issue. Samples are mainly vowel based, but you’ll find consonants, articulations, words and phrases. Almost all the presets use reverb, so no doubt some will prefer to lower or turn it off.

Each “instrument”, America, Bulgaria, India, Syria and Wales, has Elements and Master programs, and three of them have more to offer: America has “Oo” in True Legato and Portamento and Bulgaria has Breath sounds. Wales is the most complete since in addition to “Ah” and “Oh” in True Legato, Portamento and DXF, East West has sampled vowels, words and phrases. Even if the recording is near perfect, playing solo, chromatically and/or legato sometimes results in slightly artificial sounds, because of some cancellation or addition of certain frequencies/harmonics.

America Master offers 10 articulations, from “Ah” to “Muah”, in a Enya-esque or Dead Can Dance type moods. These sounds were clearly conceived, and are perfect, for pads or single notes, but not to build melodies.

Bulgaria is more specialized, offering pads as well as words or articulations, and typical phrases as sung by the Bulgarian Voices (••09-bulgarianmood.mp3••). The concept, also used in some other voices, is to offer complete phrases whose first note corresponds to the note played. Then the phrase development is more or less free. This way, you are always sure of playing a word or the first word of a phrase corresponding to the current tonality/chord.

India uses a slightly different concept: even if it also uses complete phrases, they are limited to some tonalities and lack the chromatic flexibility of Bulgaria. There’s a nice feature: the Mod Wheel changes the starting point of the phrase, so if you hit the same note twice, you’ll be able to have two different results.

This Mod Wheel function is also used in Syria, but this time the phrases are sung  according to the note of the Keyswitch. If you hit the “F” Keyswitch, all the phrases of the articulation will be in F (major, minor and various modes).

As stated earlier, the most complete voice of VOP is Wales, which offers no fewer than 44 articulations plus 8 independent articulations (“Oh”, “Ah” in legato or DXF). This time the Keyswitches select syllables, vowels or chromatically mapped words, thus ensuring easy harmonization. No matter what the phrase means here, the vocal construction will rather sound like the work of Elizabeth Fraser but will sound different, since the vocal timbre is different.

All the voices of VOP show great consistency, and their timbral quality is quite regular. Only a few loudly sung phrases sound a bit “outside”, since vocalists had to move away from the mics when most of the library is close-miked. Even if all the phrases of an articulation are homogenous, it slightly differs from one articulation to another. So you’d be better off using VOP without the included reverb, selecting mono Channel Sources, or making various plugin and bus routing in order to smooth over some imperfections and to tighten small stereo variations between Keyswitches.

In any case, VOP is a superb instrument, much more practical to use than a loop library and it will do perfectly when you need to compose for movies, for example. Working with Melodyne, Time Machine, Radius or any similar soft/plug will increase VOP’s potential. The goal is to be free from tonality and rhythm constraints, with top-notch time stretch and pitch shift quality.

Some regrets: both Syria and India could have offered more sounds, at least as much as the others. Then there’s some strange noises here and there, like the C#4 of Bulgarian Master/articulations D0, or some notes of the same layer where you can hear that one of the mics distorts very slightly . And above all, I wonder why EW hasn’t implemented any kind of a Wordbuilder like the one the editor made for Symphonic Choirs?