When you kick up the Word Edit tab of Dominus you will see 50 little 'puzzle pieces' that are flat on the left and have a little connector on the right. These are the word starters. Click on one of these pieces and you are taken a page of connecting pieces based on the vowel in the word starter. So clicking VE takes you to the E page, VI to the I Page and VO can you guess... yup to the O page. You are good!
Once you are on the vowel page you can choose connector pieces on the left or word ending pieces on the right. If you choose a connector piece you are transported to the vowel sound for the new ending vowel. So I chose VO which took me to the O page and now I try the OMA connector and am whisked away to the A vowel page.
Now I pick ANNA, because I knew an adorable lady named Anna, and since this ends in A, I stay on my current page. Now I try ANE because now I'm thinking of the lady. This takes me (R U Ready) to the E page.
Now my word is getting pretty long so I'm going to choose an end piece from the right. ENTUM seems alright. End pieces are special in that the vowel will hold until you release the key and then the final vowel will sound. So here I'll get the Oooo sound until I release for an Mmmm. Now I have my non-sense Latin word Vomannanentum.
Look under the word and you will see lots of little half notes. When I play Vomannanentum, each of the five syllables has exactly the same length. Well expect the last which I can control with my release.
This gets boring so lets change the note length. Click on the note you can go from a sixteenth to a double note or even custom lengths. So my word might have this cadence when I'm done. Note that you can also choose note length when you are picking your syllables in the Word Builder. I just prefer to do it this way as I listen to the whole word. Also when getting cadence I suggest just holding one note.
As you can see from my little picture, Dominus can do real Latin words as well. In fact it comes with a whole list of real words and with a little experimentation you can make many more.
It's a but hard to see in my picture but when you hit presets you get a scroll-able list of tons of words that are ready for use. This is where I got Gloria and Deo from.
Now in trying to do 'Gloria in excelsis deo', I had a problem finding an In, but then I realized I could just attach it to the from of Excelsis. So there in three words is a pretty good version of my phrase.
I find the Word Builder to be quite clever and fairly intuitive. Once you figure out that the vowels are the legato connectors and you are basically jumping between vowel pages, you can get what you want pretty quickly.
The note length is easy and seems to work. I was worried that going too long or short might mess up the sound if the words, but it really doesn't. The only suggestion is for the longer intro and outro words I wouldn't go down to sixteenth notes as you need to give the singers enough time to get in all those vowels.
Varying the note lengths really adds some life to the words. At first I was just using the default half notes and it sounded good enough but a bit digital. When I started messing with the word lengths it started sounding much more like the real choir. Also remember to give yourself space for your ending syllable. You need to hear that last vowel (if you have one) on each word to really sell the word.
Dominus - Overview
Dominus - Legato
Dominus - The Samples
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