Saxophone | Music Tech

MTM EXCELLENCE AWARD 

You're nearing the completion of a great track, but it needs something extra to make it sparkle. Some sax sounds, perhaps? A quick trawl through your sample library turns up an assorted collection of loops, none of which fits the track. Yes, you can process them, you can pitch shift them, you can even play them backwards but unfortunately, you can't do what many musicians want to do with sampled musical lines and phrases: change the individual notes. It's always been a problem.

But maybe not anymore because sample-library producers Ueberschall and Celemony (the makers of Melodyne) have put their heads together and come up with Liquid Saxophone. It's the first of their new Liquid Instrument Series (LIS), which provides a genuinely new range of tools for controlling monophonic sampled material.

Instant control
Like Yellow Tools Candy and LinPlug SaxLab, Liquid Saxophone works as a plug-in within your host sequencer. However, it's not to be confused with those and other similar virtual instruments. You don't play notes on a MIDI keyboard (or any other controller) and trigger samples this is purely a sample playback instrument. But unlike any other sample player around at the moment, it employs Melodyne's Local Sound Synthesis technology, which provides instant control over the pitch and length of the individual notes within a given musical phrase.

Browsing for and loading samples is done in the conventional soft-sampler fashion and you choose from four categories: soprano, alto, tenor and baritone (the four most commonly used saxophones). Each group contains a selection of related samples that match each other in terms of musical style, expression and dynamics. You can preview these (tempo-synced to your sequencer) before loading the sample of your choice for editing. What's really handy though, even at this stage, is the facility to choose a key and scale type (blues, pentatonic, major, minor and so on), to fit your tune. The samples adjust automatically, in a remarkably fluid fashion. Once loaded, every single note you hear is displayed on a Melodyne-style grid (notes vertically and time horizontally) ready for editing. Each note is encased in a tube and to manipulate them, all you do is drag the tubes around on the grid.

Pure sound
The quality of the samples all recorded dry and free from any processing is first-class. And as you might expect in a sax sample library, much of the material is in a jazzy vein, and some of it is rather busy particularly the bebop stuff. But that's not a problem because if a phrase contains too many notes for your taste, you can simply delete them and fill the gaps by lengthening (dragging and stretching) the remaining notes. It really is as easy as that. You can't add notes to a phrase though, or change their playing order. But you can change their start and end points, as well as alter their pitch, either in half-tone steps or by micro-tuning.

This is very impressive software coupled with an equally imposing set of sampled saxophone playing. And together, they really do provide a vast range of melodic possibilities. The styles on offer range from 50s bar jazz through to 90s acid jazz and just about everything between. No classical playing, though.

However, as mentioned above, the playing is heavily jazz influenced (even the Rock Rebel category contains smooth jazzy phrases) and the collection might have more commercial appeal with the inclusion of more gutsy blues and rock licks.

That said, provided you're content to work from pre-recorded material, short of hiring a real player, there's currently no better way of adding short licks, phrases and even complete saxophone solos to your tunes. In fact, using this software is akin to employing a session musician and asking him or her to adjust their playing style to suit your music.

This is a truly innovative product. The combination of Melodyne technology and conventional sampled sax licks enables you to alter the scale and key of the material and, even better, edit the pitch and length of individual notes.

MTM EXCELLENCE AWARD
10/10