The things I miss the most are articulations and dynamics that a "real" sax would typically have. So the sample can be pretty close and still miss those aspects. I know there are tons of control options available thru MIDI and most sample instruments set up custom key switches, etc. to try to emulate what a player would do. But IMHO it still doesn't fool me into thinking there's a sax player involved. I also sometimes go down the rabbit hole of tweaking my own keyboard parts to remove/fix wrong notes, etc., and usually come back up saying, "it would have been quicker to just do another take and get it right" :-)

I don't know if it's still common, but some keyboards I've had over the years also had a breath controller input - just for blowing air while playing keys, not like an EWI or standalone musical controller. I tried using it a bit myself, but not much joy. And I don't recall seeing anyone ever use one on stage.

I keep having a blast sampling the huge number of styles and style demos - found some great soprano sax tracks from Eric Marienthal that I may actually use. Like saxman, I'm not a smooth jazz fan. But I mixed one of the smooth jazz soprano solos (1060 - setting it at half-time) with the rest of the band playing bossa nova at 140 and it sounds great! Now I'm going to spend some time with the Soloist module - plug in the basic song melody to see if the RealTracks soloist will play around (rather than on top of) the melody (which will be a vocal). So most of my my Biab time so far is finding serendipitous ways of expanding creativity.

I still feel that I've only barely scratched the surface of what Biab/Realtracks can accomplish.

Last edited by cwiggins999; 05/14/20 05:48 AM.
Chuck Wiggins

BIAB 2023 Win UltraPak, Cakewalk, Windows 10 Pro
Custom AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core, Focusrite Scarlett 4x4 interface

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