Recording - June 2015 - 44

Soundware Showcase

selected with an octave of keyswitches and
two octaves of notes. While I'm no musicologist, they certainly sound like the real
thing-it is, after all, a real choir of
Gregorian monks conducted by Javier Lara.
You may recall his famous album Chant with
the Monks of Silos. Tarilonte clearly cares
deeply about detail and authenticity, and
this extends across the entire series.
Shevannai has a lot to offer including
melodic phrases, short and long whispers,
and spoken phrases (with real Elven poetry!). The keyswitch and note layout is quite
intuitive here as well, with performances
available in eight different keys. Altus
Phrases provides 130 phrases packaged
into three keyswitched sets, with several
octaves each to access individual phrases.
Vocalists Lara Ausensi and José Hernández
Pastor deliver very dynamic performances,
putting some of that "reliable power" I mentioned earlier right at your fingertips.
Each of the phrase-based instruments in
this series offers envelope attack/release,
sample start time offset, reverb and
expression amount, and speed/tempo
controls in the built-in interface. In most
cases, this provides just enough control to
massage things into shape. If the speed of
the performance must be adjusted faster
or slower to match other elements, I'd recommend staying within ±25% in order to
avoid audible time-stretching artifacts.
The Soundscapes patches break away
from realism, getting into much more
processed and synthetic territory. I was most
pleased with the patches that were clearly
44

RECORDING June 2015

derived from vocal content, as this is an area
where I find other solutions are lacking. I didn't find the non-vocal content particularly compelling, though I can see it being useful if you
have little else to choose from in the way of
pads and ambiences. All of the soundscape
patches feature envelope attack/release,
expression, and reverb settings, plus patchspecific layer volume controls.

Singing with words
Oohs and Aahs are nice, but let's face
it-if you really want a convincing vocal
performance, you're going to need
words. The phrases mentioned previously
can only take you so far, particularly if
you are writing your own melodies or you
actually need to say something specific.
Not to worry, though-Sr. Tarilonte has
you covered.
Shevannai Legato and Staccato allow
you to freely construct your own phrases
from vowels and consonant-vowel pairs
using just over 2 octaves of keyswitches.
There are also various selectable release
sounds (SH, SS, SSS, N, Q) that will play
when you release a note (though I haven't
yet found a way to get great results with
these). A quick look at the manual will get
you on the right track, after which building phrases is relatively easy.
Of particular interest is the Auto Vowel
functionality, where the ending vowel
sound for a given keyswitch will continue
to be used until said keyswitch is
released. It can feel a little quirky at times,
but unless you need to perform flawlessly
in real time, this is a small issue.
Altus and Cantus can function in a similar fashion with keyswitches triggering
various vowels and word fragments, but
go a step further by adding a Phrase
Arranger component. With the Phrase
Arranger, phrases are constructed via an
interface with 33 slots that can each contain words or syllables that are selected
from dropdown menus. Any note played
will advance through the slots (left to
right, top to bottom) on release, so that
successive notes will trigger each successive word or syllable.

Recording - June 2015

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