Mercury Symphonic Boyschoir

The Mercury Symphonic Boy Choir is easily the single most comprehensive, playable and powerfully deep-sampled children's choir ever released. There is a profoundly moving quality in the sound of a traditional English boy's choral ensemble -- solemn lows, angelic highs and an overwhelming innocence that harkens back to the days of youth and purity. With Mercury, we managed to capture this unique spirit as we painstakingly sampled the Pacific Boychoir (ages 8-13) in the same large crystal-clear hall that we recorded our Olympus choirs (Mars & Venus), while drawing on our past production experiences with the original Tonehammer Requiem and Liberis girl's choir releases. Conducted by Robert Geary and Directed by Kevin Fox, this award-winning chorus produces pure stellar tonality and soul through a wide range of different essential choral articulations. Mercury features 42 staccato & 42 sustaining marcato syllables, each with deep round-robin and stacking/layering capabilities, 18 tempo-syncing Latin poly-syllabic sustains with phrase-synchronus polyphonic legato, molto fortissimo poly-staccatos, 6 dynamic true legato vowels (ah, oh, oo, eh, ee, mm) with intercal transition speed control and a classic ensemble whistling legato. It also includes droned and whispered chants, staccatos and sutains, choral trills, sweeps, swells and other choral effects. You'll also find two exquisite soloists (younger soprano and older alto), each with a wide range of poly-syllabic phrases, staccatos and fluid true legato.

Mercury features a full boy's choral ensemble (ages 8-13) and 2 soloists, singing traditional Catholic Latin, including a full range of standard vowel and consonant sounds. Mercury has been mixed into 2 masterfully blended composite microphone distances (stage and hall), carefully blended from an array of 12 discreet large diaphragm Neumann Microphones, with wide pairs ranging in distance from 1 meter to 20 meters. Surround mixing is made simple, with the best balance between placement, flexibility and performance, without compromising the truly awesome sound these boys deliver. In addition to the true legato chorus sustains, all sustaining articulations in the library include 3-part polyphonic pseudo-legato (all vowel sustains, fast and slow polysustains, soloist vowel sustains, soloist slow and melodic poly-sustains).

Several presets also include our custom Phrasemaster adaptive phrase-building system, which allows you to automatically progress through a sequence of staccato or marcato syllables, advancing to the next one each time you play a new note, with up to 16 sequencable presets that can be arranged, modified and triggered in realtime using automation and keyswitching. We're also proud to introduce our new Wordmaster system, a powerful marcato/staccato sequencing tool that let's you choose from 42 different words for two independent articulation layers and switch them from staccato to sustaining marcato at the push of a button or press of a keyswitch. It provides the convenience of instant word-building with the quality, realism and reliability of hand-tailored content.

Features

• 2 Room positions (close and far), created from a blend of 12 large diaphragm Neumann microphones
• Specifically designed for easy surround sound mixing, mix customization and resource efficiency
• A chorus of 25 singers from the award-winning Pacific Boychoir
• New Word Master System - an easy-to-use graphical interface that lets you choose from dozens of sustaining marcato words and staccato syllables on the fly, all with multi-layer selection and blending, legato, key-switching and more
• Combined Marcato/Staccato Phrase Builder with preset saving and the ability to store and cycle or keyswitch between up to 16 different user created sequences
• 42 Marcatos w/ deep round-robin and pp/fff dynamic layering
• 42 Staccatos w/ 4x round-robin, including pp/fff dynamic layering on 6 core vowels
• 18 Traditional Latin Polysustains w/ tempo-synching, legato & 2x rr releases
• Whispered Polysustains
• Atonal Droning and Spoken Polysustains
• Dynamic Layered PP/FF True Legato Vowels (Ah, Oh, Oo, Eh, Ee and Mm)
• Classic Ensemble Whistle legato
• Unique FFF Poly-staccatos
• Tempo-synching and time-stretching presets optimized for Kontakt 5
• A deep bonus collection of custom ambient soundscapes, drones, pads and atmospheres hand-crafted using the original choral source
• Integrated DSP effects and custom convolution impulses included
• Fully automatable custom user interface

Soloists

• 2 soloists, one young (soprano) and one older (alto)
• The Soloists feature a variety of staccatos, poly-syllabic phrases, and a fluid true legato vowel each

About Kontakt

The Kontakt 5 presets in this library are designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.1 or later. Owners of Kontakt 4 (version 4.2.4) can still use the Kontakt 4 presets we've included in this library, but they lack some tempo-synching, time-stretching and other newer engine features. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument / software sampler platform.

Check out screenshots of our custom graphical user interface for Kontakt in the image gallery above. They provide a wide range of sound shaping parameter controls, each one totally automation-ready in your host environment or Kontakt's stand-alone mode.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library. However, the sample directories are fully accessible to allow user customization, import and mapping into other wav-compatible software, sampler and synth formats.

The special Libraries tab doesn't support this open-format Kontakt library, but you can use the standard File browser tab, or import this library into the Kontakt database and Quickload tools for easy navigation, loading and organization.

Features

• 15.5 GB Installed
• 14,605 Samples
• 57 Kontakt 4.2 nki core instrument presets (for backward and forward compatibility)
• 35 Kontakt 5.1 nki advanced instrument presets (to allow tempo-synching and time-stretching features)
• 24 bit / 48kHz uncompressed PCM wav audio
• Unlocked Kontakt presets and wav samples to allow user customization
• Mercury also features a unique bonus collection of Ambiences, Drones, Textures and FX content, as well as a wide collection of new and classic custom convolution impulses integrated into every preset.

System Requirements

• Windows XP or higher.
• Mac OSX 10.6 or higher.
• Dual-Core CPU, 4 GB System Ram, SATA or SSD hard drive recommended for this library.

Important Notes: 

• The Full version of Native Instruments Kontakt 5.1.0 or above is required to run this software.
• This software will not function in full within the FREE Kontakt Player engine and will only be available in DEMO mode.