Sample Modeling Mr Sax T

[richiebee]

This offering is from Tommasini and Siedlaczek who with Garry Garritan brought us revolutionary products - the Strad and the Gofriller Cello.

Blurring the line between sampling and synthesis, Mr Sax T is a tenor sax library that uses either the Kontakt 2 Player that they provide, or the full Kontakt 2 or 3 sampler. It's quite expensive for a single instrument, but Sample Modeling promise some unique features, such as phase aligned samples that give a really smooth transition between dynamics in a single note. It works. The sound is very smooth, and its well playable in real time.

The sound is good too and the resonance of the instrument is somewhat tweakable, though perhaps without enough variety to cater to all your tenor sax needs.

Key noise is adjustable as is randomized tuning issues and subharmonic content (that can give you a really nice edgy tone for uptempo funky stuff).

Mr Sax T has a couple of problems on its 1.0 release. It has a bug with portamento that means you need to reset the value in your DAW before playback. Unlike every other Kontakt library, it doesn't remember the value for this one thing. Its annoying but apparently being worked on. If you don't do anything with it, your performance becomes a slippy-slidy, drunk like thing that's really quite unpleasant! Likewise, there is no way to completely remove portamento. That gives us some pretty unrealistic transitions over wider intervals especially at louder dynamic levels.

One thing that pretty much blows my mind is that they put so much work into making it the most realistic saxophone on the market, but dropped the ball completely on vibrato by offering up just a simple sine wave based LFO. Sorry guys, but this is NOT how a wind player does vibrato.

Another annoying feature, for me at least is that the native sample rate is 88.2khz. Why? No other library has a native sample rate of 88.2kHz. There is no doubt in my mind too that this library sounds smoother at 88.2khz, but becomes a real hog for resources. I'd rather have a 44.1khz native library to be honest, and for it to sound smooth at any sample rate, just like all my other libraries!

Another downside in my book is that with whatever controller you use to create the breath volume (you have a choice of a few), a zero value does not mean no sound. This means your timing has to be really excellent if you want to make realistic note endings and starts for that matter. One of the problems with Kontakt when you use Breath Control data is that you have to start the note, before you start the breath. Their zero value still giving you a sound means that you have to time this really well to get your sound to start cleanly.

Also they've restricted controller depth to what they think is suitable, and they've locked the entire instrument so you can't change a damn thing.

I'm glad these guys are no longer with Garritan, who to my mind is a real shark in the sample industry, but they need to ditch some of his mentality that they still retain.

Here's one of my first demo pieces using Mr Sax T performed as a live improvisation with a Yamaha breath controller and my keyboard, then edited slightly just to smooth up the dynamics. The piano is NI's Akoustic Piano using a custom patch based on their Steinway grand that was also improvised (before the sax!) in one go.

[Bigduggieface]

Thanks for the news, richiebee.

Despite the shortcomings that you mention, you sure managed to cull a rich, realistic sax tone from that plugin.

I've been very unimpressed by every sax sample library I've ever tried. They never sound realistic. Perhaps Mr. Sax T is finally getting the technology up to usable standards.

I wouldn't be using a breath controller to trigger sounds. I'd be using a MIDI keyboard.

Do you see any advantages to the breath controller over the MIDI keyboard? I'd assume that the mod wheel controls vibrato.

[richiebee]

A breath controller helps to create natural phrasing of a wind instrument. Other than that, you can easily do it without. The mod wheel does control vibrato depth. I've found that setting up 4 controllers allows a decent amount of real time control, but it still needs editing to some degree. My 4 controllers are for expression (when I'm not using a breath controller this works in the same way), vibrato depth, vibrato speed and subharmonics (that give this dirty feel that's a lot more subtle than a growl).
Ultimately, you could do it with a single control for expression, then add in the vibrato afterwards. Some kind of expression control is essential and I don't think Mr Sax will work without one.