I’m a choir technical lead for a non-profit amateur choir, and I am planning to purchase Synthesizer V Studio Pro.
Our Needs & Workflow:
My goal is to generate learning/guide tracks (MP3s) so choir members can practice their parts at home (working on rhythm, pitch, and diction).
Vocal parts: 4 to 6 voices depending on the arrangement (Soprano, Mezzo, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, Bass).
Purpose: The objective is not to produce a commercial-grade final mix, but clear, intelligible, and well-pitched guide voices for rehearsal.
Repertoire: Mainly Rock / Pop-Rock with 80% English (Deep Purple, Queen, The Beatles, Journey, Eric Clapton, Springsteen, AC/DC, Aerosmith…) and 20% French (Téléphone, Les Rita Mitsouko, Indochine…).
Constraints & Setup:
Budget: Being an associative/amateur choir, our budget is tight. I will purchase Studio Pro (which includes the built-in voice Mai) and I can afford 1 additional paid voice database (for a total of 2 voices in my setup).
Type of Voice: Given our goals, a dedicated “Choir” voice bank isn’t necessary—solo voice databases properly tweaked will work perfectly fine. Please confirm my feeling.
Multilingual Requirement: It is critical that both voices handle English and French cleanly via Cross-Lingual Synthesis without sacrificing diction clarity.
My Questions:
Given Mai (Female/Pop-Rock) coming with Studio Pro, which single additional voice (ideally Male) would you recommend for a Rock repertoire that performs smoothly in both English and French?
What are your best tips for covering 4 to 6 voice parts (S/A/T/B) using only 2 voice bases (e.g., using Gender, Tension, octave shifts, or parameter tweaks)?
(Note: I’ve seen male voices like SAROS, HAYDEN, or NINEZERO / HXVOC for rock, but I’d love to hear user feedback on how well they perform in French via Cross-Lingual Synthesis).
As someone who has used Synthesizer V to recreate choral arrangements and have been in a choir myself, I think I may be suited to answer your questions at least in part!
Mai is a great choice for a starter vocal; I picked her upon purchasing Synth V and she’s been great all around. My only criticism is that sometimes her vibrato is too strong, so sometimes you have to go into the Notes panel > Vibrato Modulation to tone it down a bit. Other than that, she’s a great tool to have in your toolbox.
I can indeed confirm that you do not need the choir voicebanks if you are just planning on making guide tracks. Solo voicebanks can perform perfectly well on their own and have great potential to sound amazing standalone, even without having to tweak them too much. That being said, each voice has its own quirks (Mai is not the only one with strong vibrato I’ve found), so you may need to adjust certain parameters as needed. But for your purposes I would just stick with buying individual voices rather than the choir voicebanks. If you wanted to achieve a choral-like effect using individual voicebanks anyway, you can always use the Unison parameter!
For Question 1: I don’t actually own any male voicebanks that support French, so I probably won’t be as much help here and hopefully someone else can chime in with an opinion for you. But from just listening to covers, I would suggest Liam, an English native voicebank. Here is a cover including him that’s in French. He seems to perform well in both lower and higher registers; if you’re limited to just one voice to purchase but need to cover both tenor and bass parts, he may be a good option for you. Otherwise, I suggest checking out Dreamtonics’ YouTube page and seeing if any of the other voices pique your interest, as I believe their voices are the only ones that support French at the moment.
As for Question 2: Assuming you’re not exporting each part separately and giving each voice part the audio file for their part, I would say either adjust the gender of each singer or use vocal modes and adjust the pitch/timbre that way. I would also suggest panning the vocals to different sides if you’re exporting your project as just one audio file, so each part is more distinct. Here’s an example of an SSAA arrangement of Mister Sandman using Mai for all four voice parts. I adjusted the gender of each Mai (minimally, because too much can be excessive) except for the S2 part and slightly panned the sopranos to the left, altos to the right. There are definitely ways to make it work!
I hope at least some of this information was helpful! Good luck and I hope Synthesizer V is able to meet your needs!
I suggest Choir 3 from Dreamtonics for Synthesizer V.
This will give you all four sections (sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses). For each section, you can choose anywhere from 1 to 16 singers.
So, if you need a solo tenor, you’ve got it. If you need a women’s choir with 5 sopranos and 5 altos, no problem at all! You can build whatever choir you want without limitations (other than a maximum of 16 singers per track and only one section per track, but you can add as many tracks as you like—so virtually no limit).
You will be able to adjust the spacing between singers and the cohesion of the voices within each section (timing variations for phrase starts and ends, as well as the relative pitch accuracy among singers).
Given the repertoire you mentioned, Choir 3 seems to me like the most versatile option for different types of songs.
And best of all, you get all this for almost the price of a single SynthV voice!
Thank you for your answer. I listened to Liam on the French cover. It’s funny, though he still keeps a strong English accent! However, since it was done with the Tech Preview version, I hope the Beta (and final) version will deliver better results.
Regarding question 2, I will definitely play with the balance/panning to give the voices a bit of separation. Your example is very interesting. I’m always a little confused when listening to multi-voice tracks: when several voices sing at the same time, the sound often tends to feel more unnatural (synthetic).
Thank you for your answer. I tested your proposal today. However, my v2.3 Beta 1 is on a 14-day trial, so I can only test it with a limited number of words.