Breath controller with winds/saxes?

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I'm just investigating these V libraries for the first time. The winds and the saxes are most interesting to me, but I'm wondering if they would really work best with a breath controller. Especially with saxes, breath would dictate not only volume but also potentially vibrato.

I can't find anything on the Acousticsamples site about breath controller usage. Has anyone successfully used them with the Acousticsamples products and found that they got better results than without?

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they seem to be designed to work well without a breath controller. I’ve got the brass and they actually need a bit of tweaking to work well with a BC: I tend to wind up just using the mod wheel rather than the BC on these because the results are a bit smoother, but I will always use breath on something like the SWAM winds.

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There should be no sound delay, so there must be some adjustments that you haven't done.
UVI Workstation works in the same way as Kontakt which means that you need to adjust the buffer size in the preferences and set it as low as possible (usually 128 is fine), basically, the lower the buffer, the lower, the latency.

Also since you are using an EWI, you need to select the EWI preset from the VHorns menu, this will lower the breath controller smoothing (also available in the preferences of the Vhorns page).

You should also know that there is a difference with traditional sample based instruments and the VHorns, the traditional sample based instruments will trigger a sample even if you blow softly in the EWI, but in our case, it will do the same as a real instrument, which means first only air noise and then it will do a crescendo that follows your breath CC.
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thysm00 wrote: Sat Nov 25, 2023 12:30 pm You should also know that there is a difference with traditional sample based instruments and the VHorns, the traditional sample based instruments will trigger a sample even if you blow softly in the EWI, but in our case, it will do the same as a real instrument, which means first only air noise and then it will do a crescendo that follows your breath CC.
Thanks so much @thyms00. I'm so intrigued by this and really want to try it, but it's quite an investment (first in your instruments, and then in the actual TEControl breath controller), then hoping it really turns into something musical. I'll be thinking about it.

Would you recommend the TEControl with the bite controller, or does that not really add much?

Side note: if you would be interested in a YouTube demo of this, feel free to let me know. I have a large composer-centric YouTube channel (youtube.com/daviddas) and am always thinking about new content I can produce, and this would be an intriguing one if you'd be willing to sponsor the libraries and then I'll buy the TEControl and make some tutorial videos with it!
--
David Das
Composer, producer / Los Angeles, CA
www.daviddas.com

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Hi David,
Actually i answered on the wrong thread... there was a question about latency and an EWI and i mixed both up...
So let me answer more in depth here:

Breath controllers are all supported, especially the EWI, aerophone, TEcontrol etc, and for each of them, there is a dedicated setting in the preference page (just looks for the preference section on the website and click on "more").

The good thing about the tecontrol is that it is similar to blowing into an instrument but with the choice of notes on a keyboard. We actually have one and it works well, although in the end, not being a wind instrument player, it's just easier for us to just use the mod wheel.
If you're confortable with a breath controller, then yeah, I guess addingthe bite control along with the manual vibrato we created would be very cool as you would be able tecontrol both the air flow and the vibrato like a sax player would.
I'll send you a PM now about the side note :)
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I'll just add, in case anyone reads this later, that I've used TEControl (Controller 2) with success with winds, saxes and brass. TEControl comes with a neat config tool that allows you to set up how sensitive the controller should be for each input type. I set mine up like this: breath = dynamics, nod (up) = growl / flutter, tilt left = vibrato. It was easier than I expected to learn how to play with this controller.

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