Choir VSTs are an essential tool for any music producer. Whether you need a choir sound to use in a classical choral production, or you’re looking to use it for more modern beats, this guide shows you the best choir VST plugins for music production.
I’ve always been a huge fan of choir sounds, there’s something so epic about them that can give music an awe-inspiring feeling. Although due to the number of people, and space, needed, most producers won’t have access to a real choir.
Fortunately, there are many choir VSTs out there that work just as well. Even professional production houses for films and movies will often use a VST instead of a real choir. I’ve been picking through the options to bring you the cream of the choir crop.
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| Best for those looking to create dramatic cinematic compositions without paying a fortune.See On Amazon |  | Soundiron Requiem Light Symphonic Choir | See On Amazon |
| Best for people creating professional choir compositions for film and TV, or for people who love their choirs and have the cash to splash.See On Amazon |  | Choir Virtual Instrument EastWest Hollywood Choirs Diamond Edition | See On Amazon |
| Best for people who are after a beautifully recorded choir for solo operatic leads. See On Amazon |  | Soundiron Voices Of Rapture | See On Amazon |
| Best for people who are after a modern and versatile sound that can be used for a range of music genres.See On Amazon |  | Output Exhale | See On Amazon |
| Best for people who own the full version of Kontakt and are after a simple but powerful choir library to blend into modern productions.See On Amazon |  | Kontakt Full Anthem Choir | See On Amazon |
| Best for people who love great quality choral sounds working on a tighter budget.See On Amazon |  | SOUNDIRON Olympus Choir Elements | See On Amazon |
| Best for people who have plenty of hard drive space and are serious about a digital choir solution with unparalleled freedom.See On Amazon |  | Choir Virtual Instrument EastWest Symphonic Choirs Platinum + Voices of the Apocalypse Bundle | See On Amazon |
This Symphonic Choirs library powered by Soundiron offers high-quality sound at a relatively affordable price. The plugin is supported in either Kontakt Player or the full version of Kontakt. This library was purpose-built for film scores and is a one-stop shop for all your orchestral choir needs.
An immediately notable point about the Requiem Light Symphonic Choir plugin was how storage-friendly it was for a fully featured choir vst library. Using only 5GB for a library that features vocalists from four professional choirs recorded through 12 individual large diaphragm mics is impressive. It’s super friendly on your RAM too because it’s a Kontakt library.
Vocals were recorded in San Francisco at a historic sanctuary hall, giving it a beautifully authentic natural reverb. Additionally, the plugin contains 119 impeccable convolution reverb simulations, adding more color to your choir plugin.
The Requiem Light Symphonic Choir collection includes the fundamental Ah, Eh, and Oh vowel types with smooth piano to forte dynamics, as well as polyphonic true legato sustains for a full unison choir.
Additionally, it features divisi sustains for six popular vowel sounds for both a male and female choir (Ah, Ee, Eh, Ih, Oh, and Oo). There are 16 ultra-forte sustaining single-syllable marcato words with integrated phrase-sequencing and 24 staccato syllables with round-robin available. You aren’t limited to choral atmospheres here!
It also includes drones, choral environments, soundscapes, and developing sound-designed pads created from the original recording. This library can be just as useful in creating a dramatic film trailer as it is for adding some ambiance to a dark techno track.
A top-of-the-range choir plugin, EastWest Hollywood Choirs has all the articulations and voicings you could ever need. It also includes the revolutionary Word Builder tool, letting you construct any phrase or lyric you can type! Wow!
EastWest created this award-winning male and female choir VST with the vision of delivering an industry-standard digital choir solution. It offers more comprehensive controls than most choir libraries out there.
Perhaps the most impressive part about the Eastwest sounds Hollywood Choirs is the Word Builder 2 function. You can enter any word or phrase into WordBuilder 2 and the full female or male choir will sing it in perfect harmony.
Hollywood choirs offer a wide variety of artistic possibilities, including pre-built English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin phrases. You can quickly and easily combine them to produce awe-inspiring results.
EastWest Hollywood Choir Diamond also includes an indispensable feature for film, television, and game composers, the Diamond Edition offers a 13 microphone user-controllable setup intended for surround sound and virtual reality. This lets you blend the mix exactly as you need creating the desired sound quality that fits the scene you’re composing to.
However, all of this quality and capability comes at a cost. This plugin comes at nearly $400 so not everyone can afford it. Although in professional production environments this isn’t a huge expense and can produce results with much higher quality than you would get spending the same amount booking a real choir.
You also need a lot of hard drive space, the library for this VST is a whopping 59 GB. If you’re serious about cinematic compositions however it’s certainly worth the memory.
Voices of Rapture is a complete solution for choirs and solo singers alike. The plugin provides alto, soprano, bass, and tenor voices created by four separate performers and a range of sound-designed atmospheric pads.
Soundiron recorded over 50 hours of audio from four incredibly talented opera singers to create Voices of Rapture. The hard work that went into this library is obvious.
The plugin contains both male choir singers and female choir singers with unbelievable sound quality. It features individual solo soprano and other voices, and combined ensemble quartets. Several choral sounds are included, such as basic chromatic articulations, real legato vowel sustains, single and multi-syllable staccatos, and Latin chanting sustains.
Additionally, it has a huge amount of exquisitely dynamic live performance phrases in a range of keys and tempos, as well as categories for Pure Vowel, French, Latin, Humming, and Whistling.
Voices of rapture includes the core range of vowels and articulations you would expect of any choir plugin. It includes Oh, Oo, EH, Ee, Mm, and Ah sounds.
This plugin isn’t just your new go-to for operatic leads but it also contains, from the original vocal source, over 400 laboriously crafted atmospheric pads, ambiances, drones, acoustic textures, and developing soundscapes.
The intuitive GUI includes controls for Attack, Offset, Release, Legato, Vibrato, Auto-Panning, Phrase Cross-Fading, Pitch Shifting, Tempo-Sync/Time-Stretch, Unused sample purging, Articulation Key-Switching, Pitch Shift Key-Switching, and convolution reverbs. You wouldn’t need more even in the most professional situations.
This plugin is highly versatile. I’ve used some pads for otherworldly and aurally exciting abstract soundscapes in my compositions. I also think it has a sound that works well for TV, movies, and dramatic trailer composition.
Exhale is an incredible-sounding VST based on real vocal recordings. This exciting vocal plugin works more like a synthesizer than a traditional vocal library and is ideal for creating modern vocal and choral textures.
Exhale is slightly different from the other plugins on this list. It’s closer to a synthesizer than a sample library. At its most basic, it provides a decent range of highly processed vocal samples, but it also has a lot to offer people who wish to learn more about sound design and textural composition.
This plugin blends synthetic sounds with real vocal samples for music creation. It has all the essential tools you need to create cinematic music, or even compose music in a classical style. It doesn’t contain recordings of a true choral performance like the Hollywood choirs, however, it still is a strong tool for choral scoring.
It features 500 unique presets created by famous sound designers. While a talented sound designer can spend hours tweaking a unique ethereal patch, it is also simple enough for a beginner to get a lot of fun out of.
Exhale separates samples and sounds into Notes, Loops, and Slices when you first start it, which might be a little unfamiliar if you are coming from a traditional choir plugin. Although you will quickly learn how to use this hybrid choir designer tool! It’s a lot of fun.
This library offers a more modern choral tone, designed for pop and rock productions rather than classical. It’s a Kontakt instrument that offers a tonne of human energy, charisma, and vibe.
The idea behind this choir library for Kontakt Full was to mix and match 18 men and 18 women to form authentic female and male choirs, with you in control of the melody.
The Anthem Choir plugin contains a bunch of exciting articulations. Some of the most beautiful choral singers and choir sustains, which will elevate a listener’s spirits in no time.
There is also a fantastic body percussion portion with lots of stomps, clicks, and claps. The essentials for a stomp-clap extravaganza. Add in various recording locations, like a studio or a church, and you have a neat little package with many applications.
There is only one sizable reverb knob in the middle, and that is it in terms of knobs or effects. In essence, this is a very rapid plug-in and plays an instrument that works seamlessly in any project and sounds amazing right out of the box.
The vocals are crisp, bright, and clear, allowing the composer to include them in any production. Believe me, I double-checked every note, and the 18 vocalist ensembles have flawless tuning and intonation.
Another entry from Soundiron, this is more of a budget Kontakt library. Although don’t underestimate it – this user-friendly, sophisticated library packs a bang for your buck.
Olympus Elements is a potent choral instrument for Native Instruments Kontakt Player, Komplete Kontrol, and S-Series Keyboards, it has all the choir essentials you need for composition.
It packs the essential features and unadulterated sonic power of an enormous 63-voice Olympus Symphonic Choir into a small, user-friendly interface.
While this ‘Elements’ version may be a little limited on features like articulation, it means that the library is much easier to use straight out of the box. This suits a beginner but still sounds awesome and can be used in serious situations.
Olympus Choir Elements still offers loads of modulation controls, giving you the power to create the perfect sound you want. You can create custom syllables, sustains, and phrases using the Offset, Attack, and Release settings.
Real-time shaping and morphing of dynamic performance is possible with Swell and Blend controls. In addition to this there are also controls for release accents, room decay, and release time and volume. All of these control gives you a decent level of sculpting and sound design.
My favorite feature of Olympus Choir Elements is that it gives Soundiron’s signature quality, but is also an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use library.
EastWest’s Symphonic Choirs PlatinumBundle is another revolutionary and award-winning choir that takes things to the next level.
Just like the EW Holywood choirs, this plugin comes with the unbelievable Word Builder tool, letting you have a choir sing any word you type and play it directly back on your midi controller.
Symphonic Choirs Platinum includes state-of-the-art convolution reverbs in addition to mic positioning to give the user an unprecedented amount of control over the virtual environment that the choir inhabits. It also features intelligent round robin and true legato vowels for maximum realism. This can deceive your ears that they are listening to a real symphonic choir.
This plugin has a slightly different approach to the Eastwest Hollywood choirs, going for a slightly subtler, more seductive tone. This is a good contrast to the full bombast of the Eastwest sounds Hollywood choirs.
This plugin is also super versatile. It has more articulation options than I can list here (including male and female choirs and dynamic choral effects), so check out the full details on their website. The worldbuilder and endless modulation and reverb options make this thing an absolute workhorse.
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Spitfire Audio is known for producing pristine, professional sample libraries with an excellent amount of depth and quality.
Their free plugin – Labs – offers a huge array of $0 sample libraries and instruments that can be downloaded instantly. If you haven’t checked it out already, it’s a must-see, it has all the choir essentials at no cost at all!
Spitfire’s Labs Choir is a great library considering it won’t cost you a penny. It features professional recordings of the internationally recognized Eric Whitacre Singers Choir, singing in the famous Air Studios in London, needless to say, the sound quality is impeccable.
The plugin is designed to create ever-evolving and shifting choral textures by blending a range of vocal recordings. Despite being a free VST it’s still one of the best choir VSTs for music producers.
Labs Choir sounds fantastic and competes with some costly libraries. It is comparatively limited in terms of articulations and voicings – so it won’t make the grade for a professional production. But, if you just need a classic choir sound to slot into your songs then this is a strong choice with both a female and male choir. The Eric Whitacre choir is incredibly talented and I can’t believe you can access this for free! You should also check out Spitfire’s free orchestra plugin – BBC Symphony Discover
Benefits
There are so many choir VSTs to choose from, so sometimes it can be hard to know which is the best for you. This section covers some essential things to think about when choosing a choir VST to get the perfect one.
Choirs can essentially produce an infinite range of sounds and articulations. The human voice is so advanced and complex that it has a huge number of possibilities. Even a single voice has a mighty range, but the layered voices of a choir multiply this to another level.
When choosing a choir VST you should think about the kind of choral sounds you need, and what articulations you might be interested in. Not all choir VSTs offer the same set of sounds.
Do you want oohs, ahhs, laahs, umms, eees, or more? Do you need male and female choirs individually or a mix of the two? Do you want the sound of children choirs? What style and timbre do you want? Do you need the option for isolating solo singers against the full crowd?
Some choirs have a more intimate sound, whereas others are much more grandiose and religious sounding.
Because choirs are such a complex and versatile ‘instrument’, they can be relatively hard to arrange when it comes to music production. Depending on the level of detail and uniqueness you need for your production, it might be worth choosing a plugin that has advanced sculpting features.
For example, many of the EastWest choral libraries have a fascinating and powerful ‘Word Builder feature.
This lets you type in phrases and words to be sung by the choir, which then splices individual samples (vowels and consonants) together to create the words you need. This is usually an expensive feature but is incredibly powerful and super useful if you work in a high-end production environment.
Some of the plugins on this list require a full version of Kontakt to work, which is around $600 itself. This might make them unsuitable for a lot of producers.
These Kontakt libraries tend to be very well featured, so if you own Kontakt then they are often worth buying. Although if you just need a standalone choir plugin then avoid the Kontakt-based libraries.
You may look for a choir plugin that has built-in effects if you don’t have many tools in your production library. The main thing to look at is reverb.
Some choir plugins come with a high-quality convolution reverb that simulates a real space to create a highly natural reverb sound. Others have no effects and just offer the raw sound library.
If you already have access to high-quality reverbs and effects then you might be better off choosing a plugin that focuses purely on the raw sounds rather than any additional processing where your budget might be wasted.
Choir plugins can be pretty complicated tools, due to the complex and flexible nature of choral performances. Some plugin UIs (user interfaces) are outdated, cluttered, and not intuitive, which can be off-putting.
You can find choir plugins for all levels of budgets and you can even get some great free plugins out there. From bargain bin deals in the $20 range to cutting-edge professional libraries going for $1000+. The amount of money you invest into your virtual choir depends on how important the choir sound is for your production tasks.
If you just want to use an odd sample in a track you make in your bedroom, then the cheaper libraries will be fine. However, if you need to compose choral pieces for professional situations like TV shows or movies, then I’d recommend splashing out on a top-of-the-line plugin.
Making a choir sound better isn’t always easy, but there are several steps you can follow to get a better sound.
First, it’s essential you EQ your choir properly. Because choirs create such a rich and full sound, they often need a fair amount of frequency sculpting to get them to blend into a mix.
Next up, it’s also important that you control the dynamic range. Choirs are very dynamic, you don’t want to over-compress a choir, flattening it too much, but also they tend to need some compression to balance the loudest and quietest performances.
The main thing to improve a choir sound is by using a nice reverb. The exact type you use depends on the choir sound you are going for, but I generally recommend using something that models a church or cathedral, for the most epic tone.
Finally, adding some saturation to a choir sound can help to increase the bite and richness, giving it a fuller and more visceral tone.
EQing a choir can be quite a complicated task due to the complexity of their sound and frequency content. The human voice tends to sit in the mid-range, however, choirs often feature performers in the lower and higher regions.
Depending on the sound you’re going for, often it’s worth boosting 10kHz and above to bring out the detail and clarity. Often choirs are recorded with distant microphones (see also best microphone for choirs here) which reduces high-end definition.
Depending on how bassy you want it to sound, you can also be quite brutal with cutting the subfrequencies. Choir recordings are often rumbly affairs.
Vocals are known to be one of the toughest sounds to mix for several reasons. Firstly, they are often the most prominent, front and central, element of a track. Any mistakes or unpleasantness will be very obvious.
Secondly, the human voice is a very delicate and specific sound, our ears are incredibly sensitive to them. It only takes the slightest amount of incorrect processing to create a noticeably unnatural sound.
Ultimately it depends on what you need, it’s hard to say for certain what the best choir VST plugins are but the EastWest choral libraries tend to be the most powerful and fully featured. Not much competes with them in terms of scale and flexibility. These are truly professional libraries that are regularly used in blockbuster Hollywood productions.
They offer a level of customization that isn’t easily found anywhere else. Their advanced phrase/word builder lets you create custom vocal lines for the choir to sing. It’s like conducting a choir in real time!
The world of choir VSTs can be a bit daunting and it’s hard to know what you’re getting before you try it out but the most important thing to do when choosing what to buy is weigh up your needs and do your research!
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