Hard to hear past that awful clarinet sound…

I’m afraid that we’ve moved past sampled winds lately, modeled horns saxes and woods behave far more realistically. Not that I don’t think that that sound couldn’t be played better, but there’s a limit.

I think one of the things few keyboard players do is ‘breathe’ while you play wind sounds. A sample is so static, and just playing and holding the notes like you would an organ sound completely misses what makes the sound so popular. Even GREAT samples, played like an organ reveal just how weird the raw sound of so many reed and brass notes are. Don’t get me started about oboes or bassoon samples!

A horn player BREATHES, swells, dies, runs out of breath (!) vibratos expressively (real vibrato is completely different from a fixed rate LFO affecting pitch only) slurs from one note to the next, tongues differently, a myriad of things to shape the phrase, to pull the musicality out of a sound that is pretty boring listened to one note at a time, which is what samples are…

I’m a bit disappointed that firstly, the player in this demo didn’t really use the swell pedal to add a bit of dynamics and shape to the phrases(don’t even need modeling for that!) but also didn’t use the vibrato much, a signature of that 40’s Benny Goodman type sound, or the Glen Miller style.

Then, to be honest, the feature being demonstrated was somewhat buried by the lead, making it hard to distinguish how it was voicing the section.

Take a listen to SWAM using the Divisimate software, and you realize that this sort of stuff can be done MUCH better (and much less expensively than a Wersi!) nowadays.

And yes, this seems VERY much like Yamaha’s Ensemble feature that’s been out for 5 years or more (was on the OG Genos, iirc). Perhaps a little more control, but until I hear a more convincing demo, not as well as Yamaha’s implementation.

As a horn player, nothing grinds my gears like a bad arranger demo of someone playing horn sounds like an organ! 😨😱🤬🎷🎺🪈