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http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2017/07/14/keyboard-performance-techniques-for-emulating-traditional-instruments/
Some good techniques are showcased here. This video also shows that it is not the age of the sound source, it is the experience of the player.
Excellent video. He hits on the most important aspect of emulation of any kind: know and understand the playing techniques of the instrument being emulated. Probably best demonstrated in his mimicry of the trumpet solo lines where he does a pretty great job of the trills and turns that trumpet players interject into their lines. He has clearly woodshedded how to do this with everyone of the patches he is using, an accomplished keyboard player through and through. He knows those Kurzweil patches like the back of his hand.

I can offer only one technique variation that I think would help him. On acoustic guitar patches, it helps to vary the note order of arpeggios for variety sake. He strictly used an "all the way up then all the way down" arpeggio style, which gets old sounding pretty quickly. Travis style picking almost always reverses interval direction note to note. That little variation would make his acoustic guitar emulation get just a slight improvement over what he showed.

His string technique is right on the money also for pads in general. Open up the chord through spreading out the notes between hands and using FEWER simultaneously played notes. His comment about using the lines of a string section shows that he has studied arrangement to some extent. He is effectively arranging on the fly. That takes practice. And discipline. Last year I composed a song where I intentionally limited myself to a maximum of two simultaneously played notes to form the harmonic structure to see what f I could make use of spread intervals for drama. It was one of the February Album Writing Month songs I wrote . Admittedly I used some long delay to cheat a little, but it got very positive reaction from listeners. It was actually hard to comply with the limitation.
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