Mars Symphonic Men's Choir

The Mars Symphonic Men's Choir is a comprehensive male choral ensemble library designed for professional film and television scoring, symphonic arrangement and music production. It is the most complete and detailed men's choir sample library available anywhere, with a sound and playability that cannot be matched. Mars was designed as the first offering in our now widely acclaimed Olympus choral series. To build this titan, we took everything we had learned from engineering, developing and programming previous choir projects we worked on over the years at Tonehammer (Requiem, Liberis) and applied them here. Our goal was to provide a level of total flexibility, deep functionality and total sonic power that professional composers need.

Mars covers a wide range of Latin, Russian (Slavonic) and Pure Vowel content, with a full set of chromatic articulations including sustains, marcatos, staccatos, true legato, clusters, falls, swells, effects and a trio of stellar male soloists. We recorded over 10 days at Montclair Presbyterian, high in the Oakland Hills, with a 30-voice hand-picked group of SF Symphony Chorus, SF Opera, SF Choral Society and Volti singers. It includes a pair of simplified wide stereo mic positions (stage and hall), giving you the flexibility to incorporate the full-bodied sound of Mars easily and efficiently into your mix.

Mars offers unbeatable value, with superior range of detailed articulations, robust sonic presence and excellent true legato fluidity at an affordable price.

Contents

Mars features a full 30-voice male chorus as well as 3 soloists singing in both Slavonic (Russian liturgical) and Latin. A wide variety of content is included for both languages, as well as a large collection of choral effects (shouts, sweeps, clusters, etc.). It includes two masterfully mixed composite microphone distance positions (stage and hall), carefully blended from an array of 10 discreet large-diaphragm Neumann Microphones, with wide pairs ranging in distance from 1 meter to 25 meters. The two-composite position configuration allows the best balance between placement, flexibility and performance while providing a truly massive, robust and full-bodied sound.

In addition to the true legato, chorus sustains, ALL sustaining articulations in the library include 3-part polyphonic pseudo-legato (all vowel sustains, fast & slow polysustains, soloist vowel sustains, soloist slow & melodic poly-sustains) Mars also features a unique bonus collection of Ambiences, Drones, Textures and FX content.

Features

Full Chorus

• 2 Languages: Slavonic (Russian liturgical) and Latin.
• Massive New Marcato Builder - Explore our brand new word-building functionality, with your choice of 7 major vowel sustain types, each with multiple variants and a combined total of 42 independently selectable attack syllables and 42 release sounds, each with independent round-robin and automation-ready controls.
• 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/ round-robin.
• 26 Staccatos w/ round-robin.
• Kontakt 5 Tempo-Synching for poly-sustain presets.
• Kontakt 5 Time-stretching for Choral Effects.
• Kontakt 5 Legato Speed Control (from tight legato to slow portamento).
• 12 Slavonic 100bmp Slow Polysustains (sustaining w/release).
• 11 Slavonic 140bpm Fast Polysustains (sustaining w/release).
• 11 Latin 100bmp Slow Polysustains (sustaining w/release).
• 14 Melodic "Gregorian" Extended slow Poly-sustains, with Atonal Droning Versions of each: (70 bpm / 3/4 timing).
• 14 Latin whisper Slow Polysustains (sustaining w/release).
• 7 Latin 140bpm Fast Polysustains (sustaining w/release).
• Dozens of unique sustaining vowels w/ round-robin and independent attack & release (PP - FFF).
• 5 True Legato Vowels: Ah, Oo (p), Oo (f), Oh, Mm.
• A huge collection of choral shouts, effects, drones and war chants / yells.

Soloists

• 1 Master Bass Soloist and 2 Exquistite Tenor Soloists, singing in both Slavonic & Latin.
• Each language incudes of a full collection of 1 Bass and 1 Tenor articulations.
• 10 Standard Slow Polysustains.
• A wide variety of Solo Staccatos (23 syllables for the Bass and a total of 24 between the two Tenors).
• A wide selection of True-melodic Polysustains.
• Kontakt 5 Time-stretching for Choral Effects and Emotional Solo Phrases.

Kontakt Format

This library is designed for the full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt 4.2 or later. Kontakt is an industry-standard advanced virtual instrument software platform.

This is a standard Kontakt open-format library, so the free Kontakt Player does not fully support it and can only run it in a limited "demo mode". However, the sample directories are unlocked so you can use them in 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 and import this library into the Kontakt Quickload window for easy loading and navigation.

Product Specs

• 17.9 GB Installed
• 16,091 Samples
• 220 Kontakt 4.2 nki core instrument presets and 73 nkm multis (for backward and forward compatibility)
• 74 Kontakt 5.1 nki advanced instrument presets and 36 nkm multis (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
• Mars 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

The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 5.1 (or later) is required to use the Kontakt 5 .nki instrument presets included in this library. The full retail version of Native Instruments Kontakt version 4.2.4 (or later) is required to use the Kontakt 4 .nki instrument presets included in this library. The free Kontakt "Player" and "Add Library" import process do not support this standard open-format Kontakt library.

• Windows XP or later.
• Mac OSX 10.6 or later.
• 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.