best 'choir' patches?

[c-level]

what are your favorite model keyboards for good 'choir' style 'ooh, aah, ohh' style patches? they are mostly on PCM sampled keyboards correct? i remember their being cheesy but usable ones on some roland digital piano in the piano labs in high school...

[balma]

Monks, Choirs.... one of my fav sounds.

Have used lots of synths for obtaining monks/choir sounds, most of them romplers:

Roland Fantom, XP80, Vsynnth Prophet VS, Motif, W7. EX5, Karma, Fizmo. etc. etc .etc.

Haven't found anything better than the E-mu engines for them. I like choirs when modulated from several ADSR envelopes acting slightly over parameters like fine tunning and small volume variations, and using several vocal waveforms layered together.

The Zplane filters, found on several Emu romplers and racks, have several filters dedicated to modulate vocals. they can vary depending from the model.

The command stations come with 9 different 12 order Filters for modulating vocals. They produce very complex formants over vocal tonalities.
The ZPlane filters wich work VERY well with choirs are:
AahAyEeh
Ooh-To-Aah
MultiQVox
Ooh-To-Eee
TalkingHeadz
Eeh-To-Aah
UbuOrator
DeepVouche
AngelzHairz

Haven't heard or use anything better for making choirs. You can combine from 4 to 12 voice samples to create huge, misterious or angelical vocalizations, each voice with its dedicated vocal modulations.

[ted1986]

I'm not sure about the best choir patch but my favorite is the V.O.I.C.E.S. patch on the Roland JX-8P, I believe it is no.8 on the factory presets.

[balma]

command station, XL7 rom

Just turned it on, and played two/three notes with some vocal patches I programmed.

[bhrama]

obviously not as versatile (or mind altering!) as Balma's examples, but when reading the title of the thread I thought of the lovely VP330 choir sounds.

[recordingpianoman]

I remember over-using the Korg M1 choir in all of my slightly gothy synth-pop music from high school in the late 80's, and I loved it. Also, as cheesy and unrealistic as it is, I really like the PPG wavetable choir. I've never had access to a Bloefeld, but does it contain the wavetable with this sound?

[DesolationBlvd]

I'm not sure about the best choir patch but my favorite is the V.O.I.C.E.S. patch on the Roland JX-8P, I believe it is no.8 on the factory presets.

Since we brought up analog choirs, I managed to get a good enough choir out of the MKS-80 with the same filter, helped by using the poly-unison. If only I had the JX-8P presets, so I could recreate them using the MKS-80.

I always thought the Polysix did a great analog choir. The self-oscillation in SSM2044 helps. IR3109 as used in Juno-60 makes it sound more like an organ.

[garranimal]

The Kawai K5000 series synths are most excellent for choir, has a 128-band formant filter. The formant filter has its own envelope which emphasizes a central set of frequencies and sweeps up/down the formant filter range, it's really insane. I really haven't experimented much with making more choir patches but intend to conjure some. This demo shows some a decent choir example at 0:10 and some choir-inspiried sounds 1:28, and 3:06

[nvbrkr]

I like the Mellotron samples, as they have an individual sample for each key. Layer those with whatever other choir sound might complement them and it's pretty nice.

I've used some analog synths together with ("formant") EQ curves and while the results have been a bit dodgy, they can be charming on their own right. Too bad the amount of EQ'ing making those sounds requires often results in a bit too honky, hollow overall sound that doesn't necessarily work in the mixes.

Other than that, just direct samples from recordings of gregorian, buddhist etc. stuff. Mix them with something that you've played yourself with keyboards. I don't think there exists any known cases of monks suing underground musicians for copyright infringement.

[Alex E]

Vako Orchestron!

[balma]

At 1:36... and 5:53



That's the best choir on a song ever! I think that's an E-mu Emulator


Another of my fav ones, is the background voice in EMF's Lies. Appears very clear on 0:55

obviously not as versatile (or mind altering!) as Balma's examples, but when reading the title of the thread I thought of the lovely VP330 choir sounds.

I program those choirs using one of my E-mu command stations wich has only 1 ROM. Should post the ones I made with the full loaded 4 ROMS unit. It's an angelical-demonic synth for these sounds. The fact of being able to layer 12 samples into one patch, and control in high detail, each one of those layers, and creating interactions between them, is very suitable for emulating huge choirs. Normally, a natural Ooohhh or Aaaah entonation, has small variations on volume and fine pitch.
One of the VOW filters, the AahAyEeh, uses the singular Q parameter (it replaces Resonance on the Z-plane filters collection) to vary the apparent size of mouth cavity. The UbuOrator raise throaty vocals... You can produce such trembling monastery sounds, or apocalyptic voices....

[garranimal]

I learned just a month or two ago New Order Blue Monday uses samples from Kraftwerk. I had to look it up again, turns out it's Uranium and indeed a sweet choir sound.


The internet rumor mill claims indeed the Vako Orchestron made this sound.

...very plausible indeed.

[madtheory]

It definitely was an Orchestron. They bought one while touring Autobahn in the US. Strings on Ohm Sweet Ohm and Radioactivity.

...and the Emulator choir was sampled from the master tapes for the Mellotron choir.

Fairlight 3 choir is great too. It's on the Fairlight US website.

[alan partridge]

The VP-330 and Farfisa Polychrome have very impressive analog choir sounds.

Amongst newer keyboards, the Kurzweil PC3K series have some excellent vocal and choir patches, as does the Korg Wavestation a long while back and the Yamaha EX5.

[tekkentool]

Absolutely cannot stand that 90s era rompler styled cheesy choir pad sound. Hate it with a burning passion. If I need Ooh's and Aah's I go further back or more realistic. Usually I like mellotron samples, If I could get my hands on the orchestron samples I'd be a fan too.

For example:



It's a very piercing sound that gets through the top layer of mixes well when HPF'd. (sounds awful in SC player, please download for proper clarity).