I don't care how well you play you can't fool a live audience. I believe they can see there aint no sax, drummer, guitar *******player! It's just one guy setting behind a keyboard. Unless like Boo you do play sax with a backing track. I haven't seen him do it yet but I've heard him, not bad. But I'll bet the audience can tell There
is not a band standing behind him.
Smokey

As a sax player who's also involved in midi hardware and software development, the idea that a keyboard will never be able to emulate a sax sound is pretty much the same thing we were saying about guitars not so long ago. The problem is that when designing keyboard hardware, manufacturers only have so much memory to play with so they tend to concentrate the most effort on those sounds which will give the most "mileage". Hence the recent focus by many manufacturers on muli-level guitar samples with all the associated scratches, strums and scrapes which can be used in about 70% of the onboard styles to great effect.

As memory becomes less of an issue (and less of an expense), we will begin to see this multi-level sampling technique applied to other instruments such as sax. If you use GigaSampler or EXS24 you can already buy these types of sounds from the VSL Horizon series. Here's a link to their latest saxophone volume with some demos.
Vienna Horizon Series Saxes

I really don't think you can listen to these demos and tell me that it sounds like a keyboard and a midi sequencer. Sure these are very large sample libraries but I don't think it will be too long before sounds of this quality begin to appear in keyboard hardware.

[This message has been edited by Chris A (edited 02-01-2004).]

Thanks guys for the feedback... For now I'm going to steer clear from the sax... The sweet flute however, can take a bit of the sax's flack... And you can't beat the strings on the 2000 Plus the Tyros styles help and the ots setting is a huge plus....
Thanks again,
DJ

I agree wholeheartedly Chris!

I can foresee in the not to distant future memory becoming very inexpensive (which it already is to a great degree) and Keyboards incorporating huge amounts of memory for their respective Wav ROM's. What we see in Keyboards now will look like kilobytes in comparison to what they will have. I can see the big 3 (Yamaha, Roland, and Korg) putting Gigabytes of internal Wav ROM memory in their Keyboards in just a few short years from now, ie., - under 10 years.

And I agree that the sounds of Saxes and other hard to reproduce sounds will go from average to awesome because of not only larger samples but because of other advanced breakthroughs in Keyboard related hardware technologies and sound reproduction techniques. And speaking of sound reproduction techniques: Korg has now advanced their sound reproduction capability with the new RX technology implemented into the Pa1X.

And I am eagerly anticipating Yamaha to come out with some new radical sound technology breakthrough for their Keyboards soon too.

Best regards,
Mike

A large amount of "realism" can be gained by playing the voice sympathetically, especially with respect to almost any "non-keyboard" instrument. Pitch bend, vibrato, "breath", harmonic content can all vary dynamically as a single note is played.

Play a sax voice like an organ and it will sound like an organ. Play a violin voice like a banjo and it will sound like a banjo.

Alternatively spend vast amounts of time and effort on getting the gear setup, then to learn how to play a moog like Jan Hammer and the rest of the world will think you are a hot lead guitar.

I agree that the only real sax is a real sax player. It is not coincidence that even on a lot of clearly sequence/sample based songs the "lead break" bit is usually played by a live sax or live lead guitar even if the rest is "produced to death".

Boo has jumped in again without reading the context of the article.
Boo we all know that....No instrument from a keyboard is as good as the real thing, but that wasn't the initial question.

Why does Boo play his sax to backing tracks if he thinks the keyboards voices sound so bad ?.

Before Boo loads his gun and points it back at me, I'll say I think Boo's Sax sounds very good and most weeks I listen to his CD "In The Park"

The korg PAX1Pro is the best Sax (from a keyboard) so far to my ears.

Graham UK

Every sax player sounds different, so how can we expect a kb to emulate the sax perfectly??? ... I am not thrilled with the sax sounds on the kn6000 except for the Tenor Sax Soloist and the The Soft Alto Sax which is reminiscent of the late, GREAT, Paul Desmond ... there is a song of his titled "Wendy" that I play and I will use the sax sound during part of the tune ... I have actually seen people turn to look when they hear that sax sound, expecting to see someone else playing with me ... and I'm not trying to "fool" the audience, but rather please them, and if THEY think the sound is nice, THAT'S what matters ....
t.

Chris raises some good points, and having used sounds from soft libraries that are much larger sample wise than what is made available on any of our keyboards, I will agree with him to a point.

I still think it's pretty difficult to pull it off, meaning have it sound so realistic that noone can tell, without alternate controllers and employing some form of physical modeling. This can be important when one is creating something in a studio and looking to emulate an expressive instrument closely.
On the other hand, when we are talking about using an arranger to entertain, it's pretty obvious to almost anyone in our audience that there isn't really a sax player there, so it's realy not about trying to fool anyone is it ?

Having the best sounds you can have is certainly a plus, but I don't necessarily need to bring along a physically modeled, breathe controlled sax, because pretty much everyone is going to understand that the breathe control apparatus is not really a sax.

It did, however, make quite a few people curious when I hooked it up to the Motif and played through it. None more so than my guitarist the first time I played it with him.

Another thing to look at is how much this continues to change and how far it's come since the early days of what could be considered "affordable" synths, meaning, the average musician could afford to buy one. I'm talking around the end of the 70's .. the CS80 era ( it wasn't really affordable, but what followed it was ). We've really seen a lot in 20-25 years or so, yet ironically, I see ( and enjoy ) a huge effort to reproduce the classic synths of that era

When analog synths finally began to incorporate the use of presets, often they were called things like, "brass" or "Flute", etc. Obviously, these weren't going to fool anyone, but many of those sounds have become classics in their own right, and a lot of effort is spent today trying to reproduce them digitally. I look to incorpate more of this stuff into my own music, without necessarily trying to makeevery piece become "electronica"

AJ




[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 02-02-2004).]