No samp­led sax sound can ev­er sound quite like the Real Thing. Sax­es are among the most var­i­ab­le of in­stru­ments in their to­nal qual­ity and na­ture even dur­ing a sing­le note, and a samp­le can only cap­ture the par­tic­ul­ar var­i­a­tion(s) that the or­ig­in­al play­er of the real sax be­ing samp­led ac­tu­al­ly used. Once you have that dig­it­ized recording (which is all a samp­le is, after all), there’s not that much you can do to it (not in real-time, an­y­way) that would mim­ic what a real sax play­er could do.

Oh, you could va­ry the vi­bra­to depth with your Mod wheel, or set that or a foot ped­al or af­ter-touch to con­trol dig­it­al sub­trac­tive fil­ters to sim­u­late “bright­ness,” or even cross-fade be­tween mul­tip­le samp­les based on af­ter-touch pres­sure (per­haps the most re­al­is­tic thing you can do with samp­les but still not all that re­al­ist­ic: when a real sax player bright­ens his tone, he is not cross-fad­ing be­tween a mel­low sax sound and a bright one!), etc., but while all of those would give you some ex­pres­sive­ness above and be­yond a dry samp­le play­back, none of them would sound quite like what a real sax player does with his lips, tongue, throat, chest, etc.

No, the on­ly way at pres­ent to get tru­ly re­al­is­tic and nat­u­ral­ly ex­pres­sive sax sounds out of an el­ec­tron­ic in­stru­ment is with phys­ic­al mod­el­ling. The on­ly ar­ranger key­board that I know of that can do this for sure is Ya­ma­ha’s 9000Pro with one of its PLG slots filled with a PLG-150VL card, and also using a Breath Con­trol­ler or some oth­er means of send­ing the prop­er MIDI CCs. I’ve heard that the Tech­nics KN6000 (and pre­su­mab­ly 6500) can do some­thing sim­il­ar by track­ing a hu­man voice sing­ing into its mi­cro­phone, and using that to mod­u­late its brass and reed sounds, but I’ve nev­er heard this in action.

My $15 (not a typo!) YMF724-equip­ped PCI sound card in­cludes the equiv­al­ent of the PLG-150VL (sans ab­il­ity to pro­gram whole new al­go­rithms). I have just up­load­ed a samp­le to the Web space I got with my ISP but have never used for anything. It’s a MIDI file that I mod­if­ied from a demo I down­load­ed from NTon­yX’s web site to not use XG voi­ces past Level 1 (it was de­signed for the MU100R which is Lev­el 4 XG plus VL and VH, though of course the VH was­n’t used in this piece) that has an ab­so­lute­ly phe­nom­en­al, tru­ly ex­pres­sive ten­or jazz sax, and al­so a real­ly cool but short trum­pet part about ²¤3of the way through the song, both of which use VL. The back­ing mu­sic is en­tire­ly Lev­el 1 XG wave­ta­ble samp­led voi­ces, but even they sound better than usual due to full usage of the XG spec in­clu­ding use of MIDI Con­tin­u­ous Con­trol­lers (CCs). The MIDI file should the­o­ret­ic­al­ly play as-is on a 9000Pro with VL card installed (let me know if it doesn’t work right), as well as on any PC with a YMF7#4-based sound card or the S-YXG100plus 1.0 Soft Synth with SoftPLG-100VL module installed (this only gets in­stalled if you have a real In­tel Cel­er­on or Pen­ti­um II or ///, not an AMD). I will up­load an ASF (Win­dows Me­dia Au­dio) ver­sion as well so those of you with­out VL and Lev­el 1 XG (or better) equip­ment can still hear it the way it’s sup­posed to be. I ful­ly ex­pect that when you hear the .ASF, you will also want to down­load the .MIDi file (a much smal­ler file!) and load it in­to a se­quen­cer (even if you don’t have the MIDI gear need­ed to hear it in all its glo­ry), just to prove to your­self that this real­ly is MIDI that you’re hear­ing (off a $15 PC sound card’s in­ter­nal MIDI ca­pab­il­it­ies, no less)! It’s that good!

“Typo char­ac­ter”!? I have no idea what you’re talk­ing about. Are you see­ing some sort of gar­bage sym­bol char­ac­ter? If so, it’s not show­ing up on my screen and I have no idea why you’d be see­ing such a thing.

On the oth­er hand, if you’re re­fer­ring to the type­face (aka. “font”), i. e. a “type of” (“type o’” aka. “typo”?), well, that“s for a rea­son. I ab­so­lute­ly hate Ari­al and Hel­vet­ica and sim­il­ar sans-ser­if fonts be­cause they make the low­er-case “L” and the up­per-case “i” look iden­tic­al, or so close there­to that most people can’t tell the dif­fer­ence (see for yourself: “Rick Springfield, III lives in Springfield, Ill.” vs. “Rick Springfield, III lives in Springfield, Ill.” >. On my screen, this For­um de­faults to Ver­da­na, which, despite be­ing sans-ser­if, does dis­ting­uish be­tween those two let­ters, but not ev­er­y­one has that font in­stalled (it does come with In­ter­net Ex­plor­er 4 or la­ter for both Win­dows and Mac) and if it isn’t it will like­ly be sub­sti­tu­ted with Ar­i­al or Hel­vet­ica. I did­n’t want to take that chance. In­stead, I sup­ply a list of fonts in order of pref­er­ence to in­sure that, no mat­ter what plat­form my posts are viewed un­der, they will al­ways show up in a good-look­ing font that does­n’t con­fuse the looks of those two let­ters.

Ka­boom­ba­chuck, yes, a WX-style Wind Con­trol­ler is just about the best way to play a VL-cap­a­ble de­vice, if you or some­one who will be work­ing with you knows how to play a so­pra­no sax, clar­i­net, or other in­stru­ment with sim­il­ar key­ing but­ton sys­tems (the WX was spe­cif­ic­al­ly de­signed to be sim­il­ar, as you well know). And, yes, a VL will sound much bet­ter than a Nan­o­Synth or any oth­er wave­ta­ble sampler or any oth­er syn­thes­is method that isn’t gen­u­ine phys­ic­al mod­el­ling. Lis­ten to the sam­ple .ASF file I linked to in my above mes­sage for an ex­am­ple of what you could ex­pect out of your WX if you hooked it to a VL-ca­pa­ble de­vice!

Now con­sid­er that you can get VL for un­der $20 in the form of a YMF724-based sound card (or any of the YMF 7#4-series chips, though cards based on the 744 or 754 tend to cost more, up to twice as much [shyeah, roight! — like $40 is too much to spend to get real VL!] — check on PriceWatch and search for “YMF” to see some good prices on Acer/AO­pen’s var­i­ants).

Al­ter­nat­ive­ly, you can down­load the 90-day demo ver­sion of S-YXG100plus 1.0 for free, but the SoftPLG-VL portion will only in­stall if you have a gen­u­ine In­tel Pen­ti­um II, !!!, 4, or Cel­er­on (have not tried it on an Ath­lon, but it will not in­stall on an AMD K6 [any var­i­ant] nor a Pen­ti­um or Pen­ti­um MMX).

There are options for the Macintosh (mostly involving making them act like PCs — SoftWindows, VirtualPC, etc.), but there’s no guarantee that either a DS-XG YMF7#4 PCI card or the S-YXG100plus Soft Synth would work on them, and even if it did, those programs are expensive enough that it’d be just as cost-effective to buy a PC, or, better yet, a genuine VL-70m.

However, once you do have the VL-70m, note that the best VL editors (including the free Expert Editor that lets you even design your own models from scratch, rather than just piecing together parts of existing ones [e. g. what would a Flute sound like if it had an Oboe double-reed mouthpiece?] like the Visual Editors [for both Windows and Mac] do) are only available for the Mac at present!