Weresax - free alto sax with bonus saxcordion and sxnth

[Yeager]

Request
DSmolken could you make a Legato preset for the sax ? or tell me how to make one myself ?

[DSmolken]

I don't think you can just make a preset by tweaking the existing knobs, might need to take a look at how j_e_g did legato for it and try to adapt those opcodes.

I tried doing portamento adapted from the Garritan bass portamento in the ARIA free sounds. Technically it worked great, but it sounded terrible going down, changing pitch by more than a third, and by the time you used it more than twice. So I left it out.

[Yeager]

might need to take a look at how j_e_g did legato for it and try to adapt those opcodes.

It was his altosax (and as it turned out YOUR samples) that made me ask this question

I was already looking at his sfz, but thought that your version was somehow "protected" inside sforzando (with the gui and xml file etc) so it was better to ask what YOU could do with it.

Let's see what I can do when I have some time...

Thanks for responding

[bigcat1969]

Somebody should really make a Kontakt version with the WIPS scripts as that would have Legato...

[DSmolken]

might need to take a look at how j_e_g did legato for it and try to adapt those opcodes.

It was his altosax (and as it turned out YOUR samples) that made me ask this question

I was already looking at his sfz, but thought that your version was somehow "protected" inside sforzando (with the gui and xml file etc) so it was better to ask what YOU could do with it.

Let's see what I can do when I have some time...

Thanks for responding

Well, the bank XML file is protected, and that specifies three instruments, so you can't add a fourth "legato sax" instrument with GUI. But you can make a copy of the sax SFZ, add legato to it, and use it with no GUI (just the basic percentage slider controls in Sforzando), or modify the existing three instruments, so for example making a version of the sax with legato controlled by sustain pedal or keyswitch would be easy, as that doesn't require any GUI changes either.

If you want to add another MIDI CC control for legato time and make it selectable from the GUI, I guess you could do that too - as long as you leave the bank XML alone, I don't think the GUI XMLs are protected. Not 100% sure about that, though.

Btw the sax is over 1000 downloads in less than a week, so it looks like there's a healthy interest in this. I was just talking to one of the other Karoryfer guys about making a bigger and more detailed library of his hamstered dulcimer.

[j_e_g]

Somebody should really make a Kontakt version

How nice of you to volunteer!

You didn't?? Too late.

[Yeager]

might need to take a look at how j_e_g did legato for it and try to adapt those opcodes.

It was his altosax (and as it turned out YOUR samples) that made me ask this question

I was already looking at his sfz, but thought that your version was somehow "protected" inside sforzando (with the gui and xml file etc) so it was better to ask what YOU could do with it.

Let's see what I can do when I have some time...

Thanks for responding

Well, the bank XML file is protected, and that specifies three instruments, so you can't add a fourth "legato sax" instrument with GUI. But you can make a copy of the sax SFZ, add legato to it, and use it with no GUI (just the basic percentage slider controls in Sforzando), or modify the existing three instruments, so for example making a version of the sax with legato controlled by sustain pedal or keyswitch would be easy, as that doesn't require any GUI changes either.

If you want to add another MIDI CC control for legato time and make it selectable from the GUI, I guess you could do that too - as long as you leave the bank XML alone, I don't think the GUI XMLs are protected. Not 100% sure about that, though.

Btw the sax is over 1000 downloads in less than a week, so it looks like there's a healthy interest in this. I was just talking to one of the other Karoryfer guys about making a bigger and more detailed library of his hamstered dulcimer.

Thanks again, I'll see what I come up with when I have the time.

[PTV]

I was just talking to one of the other Karoryfer guys about making a bigger and more detailed library of his hamstered dulcimer.

Cool!

[oxxyyd]

Thanks for the sax. It sounds nice. I'm trying to understand the sfz code. What does lfo03_wave=-1 mean? Your comments suggest it has to do with noise, is it some sort of bandwidth limited noise between 1/100th and 20 Hz ?

[DSmolken]

I don't remember where I picked that up, but it was used in some SFZ-based instrument to humanize, uh, something. Maybe it was Daisy and/or Alter/Ego? It's got a random initial value, and seems to be a sample and hold LFO of sorts. Apparently wave=12 is a better implementation of that, though: http://www.ariaengine.com/forums/discus ... nn_wave/p1 - at least according to some information from 2013.

I'm working on a synth using some bowed bass samples, which also has a similar humanization LFO, and I'm going to try using waveform 12 instead of -1 there and see if it behaves differently.

[oxxyyd]

It's not only deprecated, it's not even pretty it says. Seems I've been listening to a (at least partly) deprecated sax!

From the description I gather -1 started some sort of wave (sinus?) at a random phase and then continued from there. I understand why it's supposedly sounded "not pretty", if you control another lfo with it, it's -the controlled lfo - frequency would abruptly change from some value to another.

But then the same would apply to the new #12 which is said to randomly change from a previous value to a new random value. And that twice each period.

What's apparently missing here is pink noise option, bandwidth limited to a value of some Hz, possible controlled by a controller.

[DSmolken]

Hmm... if it is a sine wave with random phase, that would work pretty well for humanizing things like saxes without making a totally random mess. Waveform 12 might have messier results, but it seems to be like a sample and hold LFO from a hardware analog synth.

This is how the humanization of pitch is done in Alter/Ego and Chipspeech - I just took a look at this thinking that's where I might have gotten the -1 from, but apparently not. It seems to be the same principle, but the phase randomization is implemented differently.

//To pitch

lfo02_phase=0
lfo02_phase_oncc135=1 //URANDOM

lfo02_wave=1
lfo02_freq=1.0
lfo02_pitch_oncc92=2.0

[oxxyyd]

That seems to be a better solution while the random phase starts simultaneously with the sound (there is no delay on this lfo). That is, there is no random sudden (step) change (in pitch, phase, frequency or whatever) while the sample is being played.

[DSmolken]

Yup, I think I'll do that in the synth I'm working on now, rather than use waveform 12 or -1.

The nice thing about SFZ being an open format is that it's easy to see how others did stuff. For example, the Garritan basses in the free ARIA sounds have some nice portamento done using pitch envelopes.

Also, just posted yesterday on the Plogue forum at http://www.plogue.com/phpBB3/viewtopic. ... c9f#p40636

"A trick I've seen in some orchestral libraries to alleviate the machine gun effect is the use of tiny pitch or EQ variations driven by an extremely slow LFO using a random wave.

So even when the same sample is triggered twice, it's timbre changes slightly. You can use that in conjunction with the methods above so you never hear exactly the same sound twice."

This was suggested as an addition to random round robins, but would also work for more general humanization purposes.

[oxxyyd]

Hmm, wouldn't it be more appropriate and possibly easier just to alter the volume/gain slightly? The main difference between say two drum hits would be in volume rather than eq or pitch I think.