Fluffy Audio has introduced Simple Opera Singer, a virtual instrument for Kontakt that puts an opera singer into your DAW.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
“Ji Min Oh is one of those singers who has made an instrument out of her voice: from the softest, most delicate nuances to the clearest fortissimo, her timbre is clean, precise, powerful, and yet expressive and moving. Therefore, after the session – when we sampled her for Spaghetti Western – we thought to extend the sampling with a unique legato articulation with syllables and quasi-words to make the most out of her remarkable lyrical voice.
Compared with the Opera Singer made for Spaghetti Western, Simple Opera Singer features one more microphone position and a special articulation called “words legato”, which triggers random syllables to make the line “singing” (…a kind of Italian / German grammelot, although the lyrics are meaningless the results are impressive!).”
Audio Demos:
Here are examples of Simple Opera Singer in action:
Features:
- 2.0 GB .ncw compressed sample pool
- 3 different instruments: Normal Legato (MW Dyn), Fast Legato (MW Dyn) and Legato Control (MW Legato Speed)
- True Legato with full sustained note after legato
- 3 different microphone positions
- 3 articulations (Words Legato articulation not present in Spaghetti Western)
- 2+ octaves note range (G2 > C5)
- Release volume control
- 12 IR reverb impulses
Pricing and Availability
Simple Opera Singer is available now with an intro price of $39 USD. Full Kontakt required.
That’s pretty cool, actually.
A perfect solution if you really need to put an virtual opera singer in your DAW.
it doesn’t really compare to ‘put a tiger in your tank’, ‘stays crispy in milk!’, or “free inside specially marked boxes of…” though.
It’s well done, but it sounds much like many choir synth voices although with better voice quality than most of those patches.
It still sounds a bit stiff with very static articulation to my ears, but if used more like a synth layer than a solo voice it could be really cool!
But personally I find something like Vocaloid much more impressive…
https://www.vocaloid.com/en/
Vocaloid sounds completely robotic, though.
The current text to voice vocal products are a generation behind what’s happening with with text to voice in the voiceover industry. Star Wars is already using text to voice AI tech to voice Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, because the actor’s voices have aged so much, and most people don’t have any idea this is happening.
Well I didn’t feel this Opera VST sounded very natural either…
I think Vocaloid fits it’s genre. I mean if you do your best to make a singer sound synthetic in various pop productions, why not go for a synthetic voice to start with?
Is a vocoder really better than a real robot?..
But I don’t think that Vocaloid would work well for say close and intimate singer songwriter style music or other music with a lot of vocal expression.
For the movie voices you mention I imagine there is a team of programmers tweaking every word manually until it sound just right.
If you put in that effort in Vocaloid you could get it to sound very convincing, but you probably do not have the same degree of tweakability as the Disney or Lukas Art crew, and if you gonna put in all that effort, why not practice singing the phrase instead?..
That’s pretty good! It irritates me in the same way a real opera singer would!
This kind of product is SO difficult to make. This is way more impressive than many may realize. And that singer is SO good.
It will be fascinating to hear what people do with putting this operatic sound into other weird contexts.