Domenic claimed someone had cloned the T2 back in the day... I wonder what happened to that?
There is a Tyros folder on the keyboard that contains lots of sounds. The problem is whoever did the work never finished what they started. Many sounds are not even looped, nor is there a LSCP file to use the sound in a GM Bank for style playback.
James is right in the herculean scale of adequately sampling an entire arranger's worth of sounds. Plus, as he well knows, it isn't just about sampling each sound once... you have to take envelopes, modulations and velocity x-splits into account, all across the usable range of the sound. It's just another of those ideas that SEEM like a good idea until you realize the workload involved to get an adequate result...
Yes, sampling is an art. You have to be seriously committed to the task in order to do it right. I've been doing this 15 years and I will tell anyone straight out, it's a long and painful process to achieve top quality results.
Take my Virtual SD2 for example. I had to listen to each and every sound in detail one by one and adjust my key maps so that I capture the right notes in order to reproduce the sound as close to the original as possible. Then I have to take the time to loop each and every single sample that makes up each sound. In the end I then have to turn around and make the LSCP file so it will run on the keyboard for style playback. The entire process takes a very very long time even for someone like me and it's by no means easy.
Do it right though and the results are fantastic. I've already done some A vs B tests to compare the actual SD2 to my Virtual SD2 and it's extremely hard to tell the difference between them. It's also worth the effort in the end for me because now I don't have to touch a Ketron style and I get very good results out of the box with no tweaks.
Regards
James