Hollywood Choirs Diamond Drops to €86.67, Down From €171

Most choir libraries give you wordless syllables and leave the actual language up to a vocoder trick or a sample you bounced from somewhere else. Hollywood Choirs Diamond's whole pitch is WordBuilder: type a word, and the engine assembles it phoneme by phoneme from a mixed choir and sings it back on the notes you play. That is the reason to look past the discount.

What Is Actually In It

Diamond Edition ships 59GB of 24-bit, 44.1kHz samples from a mixed male and female choir, recorded with a 13-microphone setup that mixes down to Main, Close, Stage, Mid and Surround positions. The library runs in Opus with individual instrument downloads, custom keyswitches and a set of MIDI tools built around WordBuilder 2, the phrase-construction engine at the centre of the product. It has a TEC Award and a 10/10 MusicTech score behind it, for whatever an industry award is worth to a working composer.

WordBuilder in Practice

The technical thing that justifies this over a cheaper wordless choir is WordBuilder's phoneme assembly. Type "hope" or "fall" and the engine builds the consonant and vowel sounds from the recorded choir rather than triggering a single pre-baked syllable, so you get intelligible lyrics on a deadline instead of a week booking and editing a real session choir. It will never sound exactly like a real choir enunciating your actual lyric sheet, but for trailer-style Latin phrases and single evocative words under a cue, it is close enough that most listeners will not question it.

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The Real Costs

WordBuilder is powerful and it is also the thing that trips people up. Complex or multi-syllable phrases can come out mushy or oddly timed, and getting a convincing result takes practice tuning the phonetic spelling rather than typing the word as written. Budget time to learn the engine before you trust it on a delivery. EastWest's Opus requirements apply here too, so plan for the disk space and a machine that clears their stated minimums, and remember this sits outside Kontakt like every other Opus title.

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Who Should Buy This

Composers who regularly need a lyric, a chant, or a single sung word under a cue and do not have a session choir on call. If your choir needs stop at wordless pads and swells, a cheaper ahs-and-ohs library covers that better and you would be paying for WordBuilder without ever opening it.

Prices at Plugin Boutique move without notice and sales end without warning. This one was checked on the date shown above, so confirm the figure on the product page before you commit, and see the best epic choirs roundup for how it compares to the rest of the category.