When acquiring a sampled choir library, there is always the option of buying one big expensive one, or for the same money, buying three smaller ones covering a much wider aspect of various choir possibilities. In this case, we are talking about Soundiron’s Requiem Light, Mercury Elements and Olympus Elements . You will get fewer microphone positions. Actually you get only one, but this is not an issue because all Soundiron choirs sound great already with just one basic microphone position – not being totally dry as many close-mic only libraries typically are. All Soundiron choirs are recorded with a nice touch of natural ambience and can be used as they are. If you want to add extra space, you can include some additional convolution reverb impulses that all three libraries have implemented in a more-than-decent quantity and quality. Otherwise, you can always can add your favorite hall or “church” (after all, we are talking about choirs) reverb from your third party collection.
Compared to big expensive choir libraries, those three reduced choir libraries bring fewer articulations, fewer samples in general, along with fewer multi layers per preset. Does this affect the quality of end results? That depends. If your intention is to recreate a real choir sound with all the tiny details, playing very complicated passages with all sort of articulations and without any background music, than yes, that could be the case. On the other hand, playing different chords, solo lines, applying a few articulations, actually just building tension inside your compositions by adding all those choir elements, nobody may notice the difference.
All three player libraries sound authentic, or maybe we should say, quite impressive and absolutely not cheap-sounding and thin as libraries in that price range can often sound. It is only a matter of whether you need those choirs. If you are after all of the small details, needing a great number of articulations, then feel free to buy any full version of Soundiron. As a professional score producer, you will not regret it. But if your intention is to add some quality choir elements to your compositions, making them bigger than life, then you will get much more out of buying these three different libraries where each one covers a very specific choir niche that would be impossible to find in just one library.
An additional bonus is that all three libraries work with the free Kontakt player and, at least for me an important issue is that they require only a modest footprint on your disk. Every library uses only about two or three gigabytes of disk space, and most of the presets use less than half a gigabyte of RAM while preserving the quality of end results. Requiem Light and Mercury Elements even come with some light patches, so you can use them even if your RAM is close to maxing out when you use choirs in a very crowded arrangement. With Mercury Elements you get a boys choir. Olympus Elements brings you a male and female choir (separate and mixed). Requiem Light offers a wide collection of easily programmable Latin chants with which you can build numerous Latin phrases with various articulations, from Staccato to Legato ones. Mercury Elements and Olympus Elements are $99 USD while Requiem Light comes with a price of $269 USD.
Read the full review here: http://soundbytesmag.net/cinemania-soundirons-requiem-light-mercury-elements-olympus-elements/