Is it not possible to synthesize a saxophone?

[dburns]

one of the eagles guys did a song called "all she wants to do is dance" and that had dx7 saxes i think.

samplemodeling with a breath controller and/or wallander instruments WIVI is the best for now.

heres a room recording of me trying to be phil woods with the WIVI alto sax:

https://soundcloud.com/tonyostinato/wiv ... ewayyouare


as far as analog i remember zawinul would get fairly close to wayne shorters soprano in the old days but i have no idea what patches he was using. arp 2600 and/or oberheim probably.

Tony, you can make a kazoo sound great! Love your playing and the things you share about wind controllers.

[SoundGoddess]

I decided to order a breath controller, I'm still not sure what software I'll end up using but I think with a BC it will sound better.
http://www.tecontrol.se/products/usb-mi ... controller

[Jace-BeOS]

€150 for the MIDI one Not terrible but I'm poor. I don't want the USB version. But thanks for drawing my attention to this product line!

[SoundGoddess]

Yeah, I'm pretty poor too, just lucky that Arturia let me resell some of my redundant soft-synth licenses so I could afford it. Not sure how long it will take to ship from Sweden to US, but hopefully not too long.

My keyboard has a breath input for the Yamaha BC's but those are discontinued and cost even more used than the TEC version does new. Completely ridiculous how much this went for today on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/YAMAHA-BC3-BREA ... d#rpdCntId

At least when the TEC arrives I can modulate 3 parameters at the same time, one for breath, one for left hand mod wheel, and then aftertouch with right hand (while playing the melody). I'm hoping that with that much expression I can perform some really nice sounds, not just saxophone modeling.

[planetearth]

Yeah, I'm pretty poor too, just lucky that Arturia let me resell some of my redundant soft-synth licenses so I could afford it. Not sure how long it will take to ship from Sweden to US, but hopefully not too long.

My keyboard has a breath input for the Yamaha BC's but those are discontinued and cost even more used than the TEC version does new. Completely ridiculous how much this went for today on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/YAMAHA-BC3-BREA ... d#rpdCntId

At least when the TEC arrives I can modulate 3 parameters at the same time, one for breath, one for left hand mod wheel, and then aftertouch with right hand (while playing the melody). I'm hoping that with that much expression I can perform some really nice sounds, not just saxophone modeling.

Having played saxophone in high school band (as all the cool kids did), I can say that I haven't found a sampled or modeled sax that sounds "correct" (or even good) when played with keys, a mod wheel and (if you're particularly dextrous), a foot pedal. You can fake it for a bit, but a wind controller really helps.

Here's a tip: Make sure you bite down on the mouthpiece of the controller to get those honking and squealing sounds--again, like all the cool kids did. Good luck getting those with a mod wheel and foot pedal!

Steve

[SoundGoddess]

Having played saxophone in high school band (as all the cool kids did)

I guess I was a cool kid then b/c I played alto sax in band in high school too, LOL.

I am hoping that I can get good use out of the breath controller. I don't necessarily care about having it sound like a "real" instrument, I just want to put out a certain vibe. But those prices on SampleModeling stuff is so high that I could just buy a cheap used alto sax and record it with my microphone if I really wanted to invest that much into one specific instrument sound.

I did buy DSK's HQ sample library which has some good sax samples that I guess are completely royalty-free, so it's possible that I could write my own saxophone plugin built on those sample sets.

Just what sold me on breath controller was a video I saw where the guy said it frees up a hand and is much more expressive than a foot pedal. So I get an extra modulation source on top of my left hand doing mod wheel/slider/knobs and right hand doing melody/aftertouch, with a bit of practice might make for some expressive creativity.

[planetearth]

Having played saxophone in high school band (as all the cool kids did)

I guess I was a cool kid then b/c I played alto sax in band in high school too, LOL.

I am hoping that I can get good use out of the breath controller. I don't necessarily care about having it sound like a "real" instrument, I just want to put out a certain vibe. But those prices on SampleModeling stuff is so high that I could just buy a cheap used alto sax and record it with my microphone if I really wanted to invest that much into one specific instrument sound.

I did buy DSK's HQ sample library which has some good sax samples that I guess are completely royalty-free, so it's possible that I could write my own saxophone plugin built on those sample sets.

Just what sold me on breath controller was a video I saw where the guy said it frees up a hand and is much more expressive than a foot pedal. So I get an extra modulation source on top of my left hand doing mod wheel/slider/knobs and right hand doing melody/aftertouch, with a bit of practice might make for some expressive creativity.

Ha! I played alto sax, too! But years later, I traded it for a guitar...and some magic beans. (I still have the guitar; the less said about the beans, the better. )

A friend suggested the same thing you're saying here about the overall cost: it's almost the same price to get a sax instead of a good sax library. But unless the prices are wildly different where you are, a sax in my neck of the woods is roughly 8-10 times the price of the library. (Then again, I was never very good at math, which is why I was in band for all five years of high school in the first place.)

I had DSK's HQ library, but to me, a couple of the saxes weren't in tune. Have you found that, or am I thinking of a different instrument in the "HQ" library...or did none of this actually happen at all...?

I think you'll also find the wind controller very good at getting some unusual sounds out of other instruments, especially pads. Playing a sax like you're playing a piano gets you a certain sound. If you could play a piano (or other instrument) the way you'd play a sax, you might get some cool sounds, too. I'm also into just adding a "sax" or "guitar" texture to my stuff, so to me, the exact sound isn't always as important in some cases.

Steve

[drunken jesus]

Define "good".

I can start by defining "bad", or what I assume would be "bad" based upon my assumption of what your "good" may be likely to resemble

https://soundcloud.com/xhip/sax-2
https://soundcloud.com/xhip/badsax

These were both done in Xhip, first by gsoto and second by me. The distinct timbre of the two sounds shows you that the two of us selected quite distinct elements of the sax timbre to aim at emulating. In common they have the sub-harmonic quality and bright even-harmonic.

https://soundcloud.com/aciddose/saxormaphone

This last clip is an analog synthesizer. Again, the sub-harmonic timbre element is there with bright even-harmonic. I did this one also.

Do those 2 patches come with xhip? the seconds a bit more realistic but the first is a really cool synth/sax hybrid sorta sound

[aciddose]

No, I'm not sure if they are even possible in the current version as I removed some of the sample-accurate modulation options due to bugs that will ideally be replaced with something that works correctly in the future.

If they didn't use audio-rate PWM for example or other rarely used features that I removed in the last release, you could in theory use them if I had any idea where to find the presets.

I remember gsoto posting his preset and I believe I also posted mine, but I'm not sure where they may have ended up.

The key lies in the audio-rate modulation though, just try running the modulators set to "audio" mode (as opposed to low/tempo) and play with various ratios and routings like cutoff, volume, pulse width and osc.b transpose. Try using sync, xmod, xmod feedback on a single oscillator, filter input fm and q mod as well as exp and abs waveshaper modes with varied bias and depth. There are a wide range of effects you can get and you should be able to easily end up with something similar to either preset.

I do have some backups, I'll see if I can have a look through and I'll post if I find anything.

[virgill]

You can try to emulate a reed Instrument with a basic modular synth. There are quite a lot of
documents about physical modeling in the net. Here´s my approach:
https://soundcloud.com/virgill/64klang2 ... e-modeling
(listen to the last patch) Still not natural enough. But with a lil more tweaking it could be nice.

[neshel]

Not bad, though missing legato.

[aMUSEd]

I've finally got a decent visual editor for the VL70 on Mac and it has opened up a huge amount of possibilities, the VL engine is so much deeper than any other physical modelling engine I have come across.

[Krakatau]

I've finally got a decent visual editor for the VL70 on Mac and it has opened up a huge amount of possibilities, the VL engine is so much deeper than any other physical modelling engine I have come across.

Custom built ? ...or something you've find on the net free or commercial, any links in that case ?



Very long time ago, some editors where available last century on Mac, before MacOS X !