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!