Every time, when I start writing a capella using modern vocal libraries, I know that result will strike me. The same was right with this piece and again I did not believe it could sound like this.
Before creating this work, I studied 7 magnificent antiphones by Arvo Part and noted continuous unchanged notes, diatonic repetitive movements and dissonanting intervals usage in this piece. I used some of the techniques that I discovered in this piece, while not making it that much unearthly and tintinnabuli.
The piece starts in A minor and later F# note is added. I used less dissonant intervals at the beginning. In the end, when I start to repeat previous material, I change some notes to create more second intervals in soprano and alto voices.
As usual, setting up vocal library took a lot of time, because you need to listen to different variants of words for fixed notes. Also, in Voxos phrase builder uses strings, which means that you need to synchronize string position manually every time before you play. Alternative variant of fixing each word with keyswitch like in Shevannai seems to be less time consuming.
I found out that humanizing start of the chords was not very important, because samples already contained some time and character differece at the beginning of each sample. More important was humanizing the end ofs the chords, which I did by dragging some note ends to the left, creating a feeling that some voices stop earlier.
Also, chord connections were important. Most of the time I increased space between them from zero. In one place I use 8 legato voices, each in a separate kontakt instrument - to use transitions between notes at different moments without cutting out some the sounding notes.
I used library Cinesamples Voxos with Full Mix + Surround microphones enabled (no external reverb).
Music fantasy - Pluto Antiphone.mp3
music_fantasy_-_pluto_antiphone.mid.zip
music_fantasy_-_pluto_antiphone.pdf