Even Realer!

Well, I took the plunge and got the Samplemodeling saxophones. They have a new release out that uses their own sound manager instead of Kontakt and I decided to add better saxes into my mix. In the past I've been relying on old sampled versions or the Wivi Band Tenor Sax. Of these, the Wivi Tenor isn't bad but none are in the same league as Samplemodeling.

The new version includes 4 saxes - bari, tenor, alto and soprano. So far I find the sound with the Akai EWI to be terrific. I quickly put together a basic jazz piece featuring the bari, tenor and alto saxes:






For this piece I took a basic jazz brush kit for drums, added a basic bassline with the Bari sax, a repeating theme with the Tenor and a solo throughout the piece with the Alto. The performance is far from flawless, but the intonations, bends and note realism really come through well. As I get better with the EWI, I expect to use these extensively.

One thing to note is that the engine is a bit CPU hungry. I noticed with two samplemodeling tracks that my CPU was almost spiking (2.5 GHz Core2Duo). I chose to "bounce in place" the bari and tenor which freed up the CPU for the Alto part. I didn't use the soprano in this one. Setup was very easy and using these instruments is almost effortless with a good wind controller such as the Akai EWI.