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Very impressive indeed!

I concur that Samplemodeling’s instruments are the most realistic sounding instruments. Someday I will have enough money set aside to purchase them.

How do you like the Swain engine? Is it better than Kontakt? I am a little leery of buying the Sax brothers if sometime in the near future they will be converted to the Swain engine.

I am a hacker on the EWI-USB. Like Stan I use the brass fingerings. However you sound like you have played the clarinet and possible the sax for years. You really sound great on these songs.

Thanx for inspiring me.



Re: Kontakt vs SWAM engine
Not in my opinion but it's probably a bit more complicated. The SWAM, as you may know, was only introduced with the Soprano Sax. Up to that time, in my experience, all of the instruments (Trumpet, Trombone, French Horn, Tuba) with the exception of the Saxophones (Alto, Tenor, Bari) played really beautifully right out of the box -hardly any tweaking needed at all, except for adjustments for the vibrato. That you need to changes to the parameters if you want more user control of the vibrato. All of this was done in Kontakt and after awhile you got pretty familiar with the Kontakt interface (including idiosyncrasies). The registration used to be a real pain, but that was fixed a bit later and it is not too bad.

However, in my experience, getting the Alto, Tenor and Bari Saxophones to play well took me a lot of time and tweaking. Since I found it so frustrating, relative to the Trumpet etc., I did not sit down for 8 solid hrs of tweaking until I had a good sound, so it took me a month or more before I had put in enough time of reading and re-reading the manual, asking questions, and twiddling. Again, other people did not appear to take as much time because they were pretty satisfied with the sound they got, whereas I wanted a mellower, breathy tenor sound. This reflects the crazy variation in acceptable Sax tones vs the acceptable Trumpet, Trombone tones. I don't much care for the Duck Call School of Saxophone, but that's just a matter of preference in Pop, Rock, and Jazz. Classical Sax sound is an entirely different animal and unfortunately, I don't know of any samples of that type.

My first experience with SWAM (Soprano Sax) was terrible. I couldn't get a half decent sound at all. This was partly because, the interface is totally different, and in my opinion, pretty strange at first and also because I did not have a good VST host program. Instead of radio buttons to turn things on and off, you have to move them horizontally (L to R). It's a real disservice to the user to force them to give up tried and true interface conventions without a really good reason (there is none in this case). Another weird decision was rather than putting the choice of Keyboard vs Wind Controller right in the Main Window Menu System, SWAM requires you to load the Keyboard or Wind Controller file. Again this works against the new user in my opinion -certainly it is a problem for anyone used to the Kontakt interface.

If you already have a VST Host program that you are familiar with, then you run SWAM in that program. If you don't they recommended a free program that was absolutely horrible. The only way it would run SWAM was with a command line interface where you had to type in a bunch of parameters with the SWAM program name.

If I were to grade Kontakt vs SWAM, for ease of learning (also perhaps for ease of use, but not as much) I would give Kontakt an B+, and SWAM a D.

Keep in mind that as far as SWAM vs Kontakt Engine performance goes, I don't have anything useful to say. The reason SWAM was created was because the developers felt that Kontakt was not good for what they needed to do. My guess is that Kontakt works well enough for Brass samples than for reed wind instruments.

My second experience with SWAM after installing the Clarinet was much better, because, I tried a second free program that they mentioned (Cantabile Lite) which has an excellent interface (including a web video tutorial), and I realized, after about 15 minutes, that there was a way to tell SWAM that I was using a Wind Controller. Partly my fault, that I did not read the User Manual right away, because somewhere toward the middle they tell you to choose between the Keyboard (default) and the Wind Controller setting.

As far as your worry about all the Saxes switching to the SWAM, why don't you ask them? It's possible that they may do that, but they may not charge anything for the new version. They have not charged for any updates to improved versions of the existing samples so far.

I hope that answers some of your questions.

Dan

https://soundcloud.com/dstong