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Growl Saxophone


AlenK

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I've been exploring how to create a growl saxophone sound on my XW-P1 in the solo synth mode and with PCM melody tones (hence applicable to the XW-G1 as well). On a real saxophone you apparently create a growl usually by humming as you blow (some players do it using a gurgling sound in their throats). I don't play saxophone but I did play clarinet (badly) in high school. 

 

I found very few useful tips online for emulating such a sound except one that said the growl was fast amplitude modulation and another that claimed it was frequency modulation. Trying the former first I couldn't get either of the solo synth's LFOs to go fast enough. I next tried adding some distortion, even though that wasn't one of the online suggestions. Indeed, it didn't sound quite right and was a little too "crunchy" in any case. 

 

What DID work for me was the solo-synth's ring modulator DSP effect. I set the frequency to maximum (127), the dry level close to maximum and the wet level fairly low. Applying that to a tenor sax wave from the PCM1 oscillator gave a pretty decent growl sound. 

 

What also worked was to use the Autopan effect with the LFO rate set to 127 to do fast amplitude modulation (Autopan because the solo synth doesn't provide a tremolo DSP effect). The sound is a little less rough but equally usable. You can get a similar sound on the tenor sax PCM melody tone using the tremolo DSP effect. I wasn't successful with the ring-modulator DSP effect on the PCM melody tone; it never sounded anywhere close. On an XW-P1 the tremolo DSP effect will also work on a saxophone tone on a layer within the Hex Layer mode.

 

Of course, a saxophone is one of the most difficult acoustic instruments to emulate. I'm not saying the XW-P1 is any good at it in general but a growl saxophone tone is conspicuously absent from the XW-P1's collection of waves and tones. This addresses that omission. 

 

PS. While it is easy for anyone to do what I described above, for users needing instant gratification I have uploaded here some tenor-sax growl tones that will work on the XW-P1. Even though these techniques are equally applicable to the XW-G1, the solo-synth waves and the PCM melody tones in the XW-G1 are organized differently than they are in the XW-P1. So these tones are not directly transferable. However, the solo-synth tones can still be downloaded into the XW-G1 and then edited to point to the correct (tenor sax) wave.

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