Our most ambitious sampling project to date! Following on from the Conservatoire Collection, which was recorded at the prestigious Birmingham Conservatory, Soniccouture explored another historic site, the All Saints Church in Tooting, Surrey. With such a unique building, huge organ and New London Chamber Choir, Soniccouture presents us with the All Saints Collection. Will Soniccouture supply another beautiful handcrafted tool? Let the singers tell about it!
ALL SAINTS CHOIR is a traditional church choir of soprano, alto, tenor and bass (SATB). For starters, this is not your huge theatrical choir with massive dynamics, thunderous roars and polysyllabic staccato, it is an intimate, beautiful and detailed ensemble choir. However, using cluster mode, it can go from sheer beauty to extreme horror with up to 12 atonal horror voices in cluster mode. There are also some handy sound design patches that give the library an extra dimension.
Upon loading, the GUI instantly captures you and has all the character and sophistication we’ve come to expect from Soniccouture. It is stylish, uncluttered, sleek and very well designed. There are no hieroglyphs to decipher, everything is very clear. Ed Al-Shakarchi’s gorgeous photo is proudly at the center of the GUI. The main patch is loaded with soprano and alto sections only when using the middle mic. The four microphone positions can be swapped and mixed on the fly.
The natural sound of All Saints Church is impeccable, and the mixing of near, front, middle and far microphones further enriches the sound. First impressions are a beautiful sounding choir. You are transported to the very heart of the church, as if you were attending a choir concert. This is the level of detail and character of the All Saints Choir. Incredible!
The vowels A, I and U are already loaded with the option to load the sounds O, E and M. I load them quickly and find that they are toggled with keys that can be moved either below the chorus or above. The full SATB chorus sounds great!
On the effects page, you will find many options for delay, EQ, filter, distortion, stereo propagation and of course a large selection of reverb. The sound design aspect of All Saints Choir becomes apparent on this page. I’m a big fan of sound design and my hats off to Soniccouture for adding a lot of high quality built-in effects and sound design options. So far, so good. The second impression is a great sounding ensemble, quiet, even heavenly, with excellent sound design options and a good choice of reverb.
Now I have left a couple of points for the rest of this review. First, when the main chorus patch is loaded, it automatically goes into poly-legato mode, and this is where I did my initial testing and formed my first opinion. The legato script is excellent in my opinion, and here you have the ability to set how large the legato range should be in steps. If you want an octave polyphonic legato, you can do so, but there is a danger of overlapping different parts. If you want it to be thinner, say four semitones anyway, you can do that as well. Polyphonic legato is not an easy feat, and as I continued to play, real legato was very well written.
Deciding that I would most likely use poly-legato for quick four-part sketches, I switched to single legato mode. For the final mixes, I would record each section individually to have more control. Here the results were excellent, and by using the modulation wheel to control the “sing” knob, I again created superbly expressive and beautiful legato chorus lines with dynamics and emotion. The level of realism created was excellent and I was again transported to All Saints Church. The upper mode, polyphonic, allows all four parts of the chorus to be played in unison, without legato. This made it possible to create dynamics and, in my opinion, a more traditional choral performance. Again, this articulation is flawless.
The last mode is cluster, which can only be found in polyphonic mode. In a cluster, you can select up to 12 atonal voices and use the cluster control to change the intensity. Each voice can be tuned to a different pitch, and the more you increase the knob, the more scattered and disordered the voices become. This is great for horror and tension, and I really enjoyed starting at 100% and dropping the controls down to 0% to create a dissonant chorus that is perfectly harmonized.
Clusters are a great instrument to showcase a more threatening and versatile chorus sound. As stated earlier, there are various sound design patches, both traditional and clustered, that enhance the instrument’s capabilities with built-in effects. There are only ten of them, but I think they serve as a good starting point for your own sound design. In addition, there are NKI instruments that cover individual sections, various microphone positions, and Gorecki sections.
I think it’s a great sounding choir that really captures the All Saints sound. I like the overall timbre, the varied microphone positions, the vocal knob, legato, and clusters. I think the standard polyphonic patch is perfect for adding texture and harmony. I also find that each of the six letter articulations sounds smooth, clear, and very well sampled.
If you are looking for a beautiful, harmonious SATB choir, then I think this is a serious contender for your money. Rich, very playable and full of character library!
Features
• 14GB Library, 9GB with NCW compression
• 24 / 48khz stereo sampling
• 30,494 samples
• 4 microphone arrays: spot cardioids, ORTF cardioids, spaced omnis, ambient omnis
• 6 vocal articulations (a, i, u, e, o, m)
• True Legato sampling
• Legato + Poly Legato mode
• Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass sections recorded individually
• Cluster: multiple atonal detune module
