The Sound Board

Soundpaint has a new legato engine.



I lacked the patience to watch the whole thing with all the bluster, so I don't fully understand how it's done, but this sounds pretty darn good to me, along with the smooth dynamic crossfades.

At $30 for the tenor sax ($20 for the alto flute) I was actually going to try it out. However, the download link to the soundpaint engine itself is not working for me, so maybe not.

If you have 8Dio Claire woodwinds, the crossgrade to the alto flute is $10. If you have the 8Dio Tenor sax, there’s a 50% discount as well.

The legato patches are pretty good, but it is difficult to imagine how we’re supposed to “articulation stitch” a phrase together without keyswitches (which are never going to be added to Soundpaint, according to Troels). At the end of the day the single legato patch is totally worth the price imho, and the potential for sound design and synthy heavily mangled flute and sax derivatives is huge. If that’s your thing (which in my case it very much is).

So for the price these are great additions to Soundpaint. My first impression of the legatos is that they are good and very playable.

And if you’ve yet to download Soundpaint, do not grab the free piano sample but make sure to actually purchase your first library with a $15 discount. That way you can test drive the alto flute for $5, which is an absolute steal. Lots of these referal codes floating around on VI-C. I have one too but I am hesitant to share it here because I don’t want to come across as one of those affiliate marketing spammers haha. (The person who refers also receives a coupon worth $15, see).

So what does all that have to do with not purchasing a “free” library first? Well, this $15 literally only works for a first purchase, regardless whether that purchase was free or not. So lots of people want to use it only to find out their first purchase counter already exceeds zero because they grabbed the free 1929 Steinway sample earlier.

The Tenor Sax legato patches are really very good. For the music I produce, soul, pop and R&B it's very expressive and can sound 'real' without too much MIDI editing. It has replaced Embertone's Sensual Sax on a few songs I'm working on. For once with a 8dio library I can almost emulate what Troels does in his video. I'm impressed.

Knocked me out when I heard it/watched it.

Tenor

Yep. That’s the demo that impressed me.

I think I know now why this doesn’t convince me, and neither do the Straight Ahead Samples libraries convince me; each note is a performance, but they’re all different performances. Yes, individually each note sounds much better than the traditional approach to sampling, but the intention behind each note dances all over the place and this ends up sounding worse to my ears, a strong uncanny valley. So, while something like Acoustic Samples’ modeled saxes, or Musical Samplings’ Atelier series are less expressive, they just sound more real to my ears. The transitions in 8DIO’s and Straight Ahead’s stick out like a sore thumb to me.

Duncan Krummel wrote: ↑Nov 21, 2022 1:14 pm I think I know now why this doesn’t convince me, and neither do the Straight Ahead Samples libraries convince me; each note is a performance, but they’re all different performances. Yes, individually each note sounds much better than the traditional approach to sampling, but the intention behind each note dances all over the place and this ends up sounding worse to my ears, a strong uncanny valley. So, while something like Acoustic Samples’ modeled saxes, or Musical Samplings’ Atelier series are less expressive, they just sound more real to my ears. The transitions in 8DIO’s and Straight Ahead’s stick out like a sore thumb to me.

I assume this is based on the demos and not your own use of the library?

Lawrence wrote: ↑Nov 21, 2022 3:08 pm I assume this is based on the demos and not your own use of the library?

Correct! I don't own either 8DIO's or SA's offerings for exactly the reasons I stated, although I'll stress that this isn't a decision based solely on the official demos, but also every piece of user media I've come across.