Sonar 3.1 + VST + Kompakt + East West

Hi BnH
I am currently using 4.04 PE and my version 5 just came. Several months ago shortly after I bought EastWest Choirs I actually uninstalled version 4 and went back to 3.1 because I was having problems getting my Tascam US2400 to work correctly in version 4. During that time, I seem to remember using Choirs without any problems with version 3.1. My understanding of the bug in version 4 was that Sonar would grab certain keys when typing into wordbuilder and not let you finish text. This was corrected as of 4.03. An easy work around for this that I have used for other reasons is to create the text running Choirs in stand alone mode and then export the phrase as a voice file. After you open wordbuilder in Sonar, you can import the text by importing your voice file. You can not import a "Choir" file when you are working in Sonar but you can import a voice file.

Also, you will find you get much better results when you first create you sequenced notes such as a chord and then insure that the start times, velocities and durations are exactly the same for each note of the chord. These values can change from note to note in a melody or from chord to chord but they must be the same within a certain chord. Do this before spending much time tweaking crossfades in wordbuilder. I have found that the precision offered by the sequencer over realtime playing can alleviate alot of the complaints users have with regards to problems such as consonants not sounding at the beginning or end of a word.

When you play in real time as you work in stand alone mode, be sure you change the "timing" of chords under the "Tools" menu to a value higher than the default of 10. I use 20. This setting refers to how sensitive wordbuilder is to the timing of attack on your chord playing. If it is set too low and you play a chord that is at all arppegiated (intentionally or not), wordbuilder interprets that as successive notes, not a chord. This causes several syllables to sound as you play one chord. It can be very perplexing. It took me a little time to grasp Choirs but I love the program and have really had fantastic luck using it with Sonar. Hope this helps
Tom

I just finished a fairly dense score (advertisement) using Choirs and Symphonic Gold. I don't see any problems with your set up but one thing I did that was both for safety and processor headroom was to pull a music midi track out of the score and place it in a new file. I used this strickly for getting my timing correct while composing the midi choir tracks. Then in the new file I composed each Choir section one at a time, bounced them to audio and then archived the midi track. I liked the idea of treating the Choir separately. For me it is always easier to work with fewer tracks on the screen. Also by working this way I wasn't risking having a crash in the main file and if I did have something go wrong I had an audio file on disk I could always go back to. Over the course of several weeks work I did have something in Sonar get corrupted to the point that my method proved a live saver. It sounds like you already know that you need Kontakt to run a SATB in one choir, Kompakt can't do it. This proved to be no big deal to me.

After I finished running all four sections in what I named the "Choir" file I had 4 separate midi tracks and 4 separate audio tracks. I then exported the audio tracks to the hard drive for safe keeping and imported them into the main project for mixing and any affects. I could always go back to the Choir file and tweak or rewrite a part I didn't like but this method worked very well for me in terms of flow and making sure I didn't lose time to a crash.

Choirs is definitely processor intensive. I have a slightly faster setup than you and 4 gigs of ram. I started with two. EastWest advises 2 gigs of ram but I found that when you start trying to push Sonar with a bunch of tracks running both music AND choirs as you would be in the compostional stages, you really start to stretch the processor and ram at 2 gigs. Again that is why I dropped back to working on the vocals in a separate file. It took the heat of the computer. I haven't tried to fake the males in the alto samples but if I come up with something I will be sure to let you know. Also, adding a little of a spectralizer or harmonic enhancer on the Vocal tracks goes a long way in making them clean, clear and coherent in the mix. Feel free to drop me a line

tomsterner@comcast.net