They still boil down to technique and style, particularly with bending and vibrato, but the tremendous care you used to have to use to make sure no two notes ever overlapped is gone, and the independent velocity and foot controller control over timbre and growl etc. gives a wider range of expression than sampled saxes, even without a BC.

The biggest challenge now that the basic sound is so good is copping the virtuosity of most sax players. They are arguably the height of complex solo playing, and masters of long extended solos of chromatic and modal magic..! In fairness, sax players spend their entire lives around soloing, they don’t have much to do with comping and chording, so they got a head start on getting that one thing right!

I knew a great young sax player that would sleep with his horn, wake up and put it in his mouth and practice! He would practice on the breaks on gigs we did!

He’s with Brubeck lately. That’s what it takes in sax world…

Time to break out those Bird and Trane transcriptions! 🤯

Rikki, the name of that tune is Sweet Lorraine. It was made popular by Nat 'King' Cole but covered by a gazillion artists. My memory is starting to come back now; it wasn't the sax I was demo'ing for Tony, it was the Freddy Green (Count Basie Orch) unique style of guitar 'comping' (the guy was like a harmonic metronome). He's sort of a legend among jazz enthusiasts. The Pa1x sax was just a 'go-to' voice I frequently use, mainly because (to me) it sounds so ballad-friendly.

chas

I’ve always been partial to this demo of the original version of the SWAM soprano sax, from way back in the day. I hate to say it, but the demo on SWAM’s own lead page is pretty terrible!

https://youtu.be/ZUxtA2MFkZQ

Then there’s this, Marco doing pretty good on a Roli…

https://youtu.be/72RrqWC3vWc

I particularly like the Roli as it introduces some pitch instability that’s harder to get on a regular keyboard. I think that’s the next thing SWAM need to work on… some kind of intelligent pitch micro-adjusting thing that would make each note a bit out of tune, but in a way it sounds natural.

Love Marco but didn't like this. I don't think he captures the 'sax vibe' nearly as well as the SWAM demo. THAT was impressive to me despite the fact that I'm not a big fan of soprano sax. I still think playing technique has a lot to do with it as well as the controlling keyboard's ability to handle dynamics (touch, aftertouch, etc.). JMO.

chas

Love this tune and as always your playing, Chas. Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, not Marco’s finest, but despite inconsistencies, there are moments in it that are quite convincing, especially the fact that it isn’t always perfectly in tune

‘Technique’ to me means two things though… first is the fingering, the ability to do legato/detaché without the hint of an overlap (until these newer modeled things and ‘articulated’ sampled saxes like Korg and Yamaha use came out and the software took over making sure the line was monophonic), plus for instance, making sure the line breathed every now and again. The stuff that makes or breaks the realism of the emulation.

Then there’s the technique of playing the same kind of lines that a great sax player does. Funnily enough, there are times in that soprano sax demo that sound really wrong to me, times where it sounds like he’s playing a keyboard line rather than a horn line. Most of it comes at the times where he’s playing fairly linearly, moving his playing hand like a pianist. Where he succeeded tended to be the bits where he was arpeggioing around, making the sort of phrases that sax players love.

With one hand it’s tough to pull off the octave gymnastics that sax players find easy. They are masters of the rapid octave leap! And they spend hours practicing arpeggios in all kinds of scales and modes. There are times when it’s easier to go to playing with two hands, but then you lose the bender… And of course, you lose the chording your left hand is doing if you are trying to run an arranger at the same time.

That’s what impresses me so much about Marco’s Roli demo, he is actually pulling off some very expressive bending and shading entirely with one hand. His left hand could easily be running an arranger!

But the technique of actually playing a convincing horn solo is very much a product of abandoning every keyboard solo trick you know! There are things that fall easily under the fingers we do almost unconsciously and are a dead giveaway we are playing a keyboard. Eliminating them on demand when we go from an organ solo straight into a sax so.o is one of the hardest things to get your head around. A total shift of your thinking…

The physical technique of hand coordination to play a clean monophonic line using a polyphonic sound has largely diminished with articulated and modeled horns, but the technique to cop a horn player’s mental approach to soloing is the one that takes forever to get right. Even Marco struggles a bit! We mere mortals have our work cut out for us!

I'm not an expert on ANYTHING musical but I try to make my music a MUSICAL experience and not an intellectual exercise. I don't want to overthink what I'm doing, I just want to play what I FEEL and what sounds good to MY ears. For instance, I NEVER use a mod wheel/stick; that may come from a lifetime of playing organ (years before synths arrived ), but for the kind of playing I do and the kinds of emulations I employ, I find that just touch-sensitive keys can convey all the dynamics that I require for non-keyboard instrument emulation (I pretty much stay away from blues guitar solos). But that's just ME. I don't think there is a right or wrong approach to emulating other instruments or just making music in general; as long as it sounds good and you don't worship at the alter of authenticity. A big help is listening to a master on the instrument you're trying to emulate and try to understand how THEY use the instrument. You also have to bear in mind that some instruments just don't lend themselves well to emulation on a keyboard. But in the end, like all things musical, it's all subjective. For the record, IMO the sax is one of the hardest of the popular instruments to emulate. If you can, just get a good sax player and forget about it .

chas

Just like the human voice, basically anything not run by keys alone (pianos, organs, accordions, Clavinets etc.) the movement of pitch is part of that musicality. Whether it’s intonation adjustment (blues thirds and sevenths etc.) or it’s melisma from one note to another, any real music cannot be expressive in its absence.

We all have heard the horrors of taking a human voice, and crushing all pitch movement out of it by using extreme amounts of Autotune. But playing sax sounds, guitar sounds, things like that from a keyboard with no pithbend is to my ears as equally horrible. It sucks the soul out of the sound.

To be quite honest, if I can’t spare my LH for the bender, I won’t solo on any pitch flexible sound. It is one of the many reasons I use very little ‘pure’ arranger play in my shows. Too much conflict between wanting to work the bender, and the tyranny of inputting a stupid damn chord so the arranger knows it!

I don’t mind using the arranger stuff to prepare a MIDI or audio backing track (although I still like to insert Markers so I can alter the structure, live), but when it comes to a choice between using my LH to input a stupid chord or using my LH to extract more expression and realism from a sound that traditionally bends like crazy, I’ll take the bender every time.

Starting out as a horn player perhaps has colored this, but I think I would have ended up here without the horn. Perhaps it’s a bit rough to say this, but I honestly feel that the only people that find horn or guitar sounds acceptable with no bending are pianists and organists!

I can’t honestly remember any regular listener going ‘That’s a great sax solo’ to a keyboard sax solo with no bending. And, let’s be honest, it’s hard to get most musicians to admit it’s a great sax solo even WITH the bending!

From the earliest days of electronic music, even from the days of the Ondes Martinot, or the Theremin, and definitely from the start of the Moog days, the ability to move the pitch and vibrato was considered its strength, not something to avoid. What would Chick, or Herbie, or Joe have played without the wheels?

It doesn’t have to be emulation, Chas… synth sounds are the better for pitch manipulation as well, but if you are going to use a sax sound, don’t dismiss the very thing that makes it the go to solo instrument in almost every popular style. Go grab that bender, try to think of it as something that adds to the music, not detracts… 🎹😎

By the way, don’t think of it as an ‘intellectual’ thing… the whole point of the bender is the day you realize you aren’t consciously thinking about it at all, it simply becomes something you do instinctively, the exact way the sax players do. You think they sit around and consciously think about bite pressure, reed angle, tongue position?

That’s what actually going on, but they don’t consciously think about it..!

It’s no more an intellectual exercise for them than for us with a bender, once you have got comfortable using it. But you got to do that first, then the world of expression and musicality truly opens up.

Great Job On "My Weed Valentine"