Re: Aerophone AE-10 - New Roland Wind Instrument
I agree, 3dogie - it does seem overpriced, to me. I suppose it's a bit of a specialised market though, so they're likely to want a bigger profit margin than on something more widely used, like a keyboard synth or a sound module.
I've been through the same process of accumulating different wind controllers, and pretty much the same ones, only I bought the EWI4000s, before the EWI5000 was available, so I didn't bother with the 5000. I also own a couple of Casio DH-100s. They're actually quite playable, and I like the fact that they're relatively easy to hack - I've added some more keys to one of them. The fingering system is very basic though, as they come, and there's no pitch bend at all.
The WX5 is pretty good, but some of the choices for fingerings bother me. The Aerophone is better, but since the fingering system is so sparse, I quickly came across fingerings I'm used to that didn't work - and I consider myself a very basic sax player. The custom fingerings are useful; I just wish there were more of them. Maybe it would slow down the response too much if they added more? I'm guessing they are slower to process than the built in fingering system.
I've thought about how a proper sax fingering system would be done. The best way would be one VERY big table, which doubles in size for each key added. That's pushing the limits of the amount of ROM/FLASH a manufacturer could be expected to build in though, even now, plus someone would have to fill in the table, or enough of it to get started. The upside would be that new fingerings could be added, without slowing down the process of looking them up - just by filling in more entries.
At the other extreme, I've seen one home brew design where the fingering table is just a list. The processor looks to see which keys are pressed, then reads down the list to see if that combination is in there. The further down the list it has to go, the longer it takes.
I'm guessing the Aerophone custom fingerings are done that way, which may explain why they stopped at ten. The built in fingerings might be done as a smaller table, which means a less simple way of looking things up in the table than just allowing all possibilities, but would still be faster - or it might be done as a decision tree, looking at each key in turn to decide between two smaller decision trees.
The easiest and fastest way to do that is in code, with IF.. THEN... ELSE, but the fingering system is then hard coded and can't be changed without rewriting the software. I suspect that was done on the WX5 and EWI series though, because they were probably pushing the limits of the technology. In the EWI4000s manual, it mentions being able to edit fingerings with the editor software - but there never was any. I guess the manual was written before it was released, and they decided they couldn't make it work well enough if they allowed the fingering system to be in an editable form - e.g. a table or a data structure representing a tree.
The point of my ramblings is that, yes, we are not quite there yet. We may have to wait a while before someone actually does reproduce even the fingering system of a sax accurately.
One approach, which probably could have been done twenty years ago, is using physical modelling to simulate the whole sax, including keys and tone holes - then you don't need a table or anything else, to tell it what note to play; it would just do it.
I've been looking at electric piano simulations, lately. The sample based ones can be quite good, but they all suffer from too few samples - you'd really need to sample each key at each of the 127 velocity levels, to make that work really convincingly. Even doing a half decent job takes up a lot of hard drive space. The physically modelled ones may not sound quite as realistic, but they respond a lot more realistically, and they take up a tiny fraction of the space, so they'd be a better choice for a portable device.
I've tried some by AAS, as demos of Lounge Lizard EP 4 and Lounge Lizard Session, plus a couple of free ones called MrRay and MrTramp... I'll dig out the links if anyone wants them.
From what I've been able to gather, the SuperNatural sounds, like in the Aerophone, are not true physical modelling - they're based on samples but with some clever way to fill in the gaps between them. I'd be interested to know how the other sounds work.
The main thing for me is the fingering system though - and being able to control something else with it. I didn't expect it to actually be able to sound like a sax, so I'm not disappointed. I would like it to be able to behave more like a sax though.
To return to the pitch bend thing - I want to have to hold the correct pitch, with my lip. That way I can bend it or correct it myself - e.g. to play in Just Intonation on an electronic instrument that's set up for Equal Temperament. I don't want it to automatically centre the pitch, like the Aerophone does, and the EWI does more so, and I don't want a dead spot to "help" me keep the pitch, like on the WX5... mutter... mutter....