Sample Modeling – The Sax Brothers 1.51 (KONTAKT)

After the success of Mr. Sax T. (Tenor), Sample Modeling has announced that it has extended its family of Saxophone virtual instruments with two brand new brothers: Mr. Sax A. (Alto) and Mr. Sax B. (Baritone), exploiting the same technology, but based on completely new sample material, with a lot of new added features and supplied with Native Instruments’ Kontakt 3.5 Player. Sample Modeling says that the next version of Mr. Sax T. (v1.51) has been reprogrammed in exactly the same way as the other “Brothers” for Kontakt Player 3.5 and will be released as a free upgrade soon.

The Alto and Baritone Sax are completely new instruments, designed and programmed for the new NI Kontakt 3.5 Player. The current version is 1.51.

As in Mr. Sax T, v1.02, the main panel allows for monitoring and inputting control data. It includes a drop down menu for Keyboard, Breath-controller, Yamaha and Akai wind-controller input, symmetrical and asymmetrical pitchbend response, velocity or CC controlled portamento time, etc.

Automatic recognition of the audio card sample rate has been implemented, thus obviating the need of manually setting the corresponding value on the instrument GUI.

Channel aftertouch is now recognized and can be used to control several parameters, such as vibrato intensity or rate, subharmonic, growl or flutter intensity. A user defined smoothing parameter helps reduce any sudden jump of the less-than-optimal aftertouch response of several keyboards.

In addition, MIDI remapping of incoming CCs is now possible, by a dedicated GUI.

Kontakt 3.5 Player
The Sax Brothers are supplied with the new version 3.5 of Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player, the latest version of Native Instruments’. It includes many new features and bug fixes, including 64 bit, extended memory and multicore support, DFD optimisation, better compliance with some OS and hosts, aftertouch support, etc. No additional sampler or player is therefore required.