Also on expressiveness: most of you seem to be willing to settle for voice crossfades and brightness and even mere volume ramps and other means of faking expression. Real wind instrument players, however, can do far more than that.

This is why I'm so pleased that the PSR9000 Pro will have at least one PLG slot (more if Yamaha has any smarts — though why they didn’t have any in the original PSR9000 is beyond me — they already had the functionality of one of the PLG cards: the Vocal Harmonizer, dating back to the PSR8000! And PLG technology itself dates back to the MU100R, which had its two PLG slots pre-loaded with the VH and VL PLG cards!).

I don’t care how good the Sweet!, Cool! and Live! samples are: they’re still samples. Until you’ve heard what VL can do, you have no idea how much more real the brass and wind sounds can get. But if you just hook up a VL capable device to the MIDI Out and select a VL voice and start playing keys, it won’t sound so real. The realism comes not from the basic tone quality, but from the expressiveness!

I’m not talking about volume or filters or brightness or other such artificial means of modifying tonality. I’m talking about voices that have, as actual continuous controller parameter names, such functions as Breath Pressure, Embrochure, Tonguing, Throat Formant, Growl, Scream, etc.! And the VL voices respond to all of these just as a real brass or wind instrument would to a real human player doing these techniques in real-time!

Now can you see why having a six-degrees-of-freedom control device would be so powerful, if you had a PLG-VL card plugged in?

If you want to hear some VL stuff, first get the SoundVQ Player, then go to and listen to the sample .VQF files for both the PLG-150VL and the VL-70m. Those of you lucky enough to have a sound card based on a Yamaha YMF 724 or better DS-XG chip such as I described in the PC Software and Hardware Forum under “Best Bang for the Buck” (or some such) can hear actual VL MIDI files, as your card (which may have cost less than $15) can emulate a VL-70m/PLG-150VL quite well (but apparently not the custom voice programming aspects). Or you could use S-YXG100plus if you have an Intel PII, PIII, or Celeron (no Cyrix or AMD chips).