Sound Dust SAXOMAPHONIUM KONTAKT

Look, I know everyone hates saxophones. And with good reason. Excluding Colin Stetsons amazing work, and Tom Waits of course, I also tend toward hating on saxophones myself.

But is it really fair to judge an instrument by its past misdemeanours ? Can the sax be rehabilitated and made sexy again ?

Here at Sound Dust we say HELL YES!

So, SAXOMAPHONIUM is a hybrid Kontakt instrument hewn from layers of baritone and alto sax plus two ancient wind powered reed organs. It takes un-cool elements, records them nicely and then re-imagines them into something entirely new.

The Components

Looped baritone and alto long notes
Tape treated, looped baritone and alto long notes
Honking goose sax staccatos
BPM synced looping harmonium hand pumped notes
Deep wheezy foot pumped room organ

With a deep but manageable Kontakt engine the SAXOMAPHONIUM creates a new reed/metal/wood based palette that can cover a surprisingly wide range of stunning possibilities.

File under.

Michael Nyman post-baroque maxi/minimalisms, undulating cinematic Zimmer beds, Goran Bregovic Balkan wedding/funeral knees-up, pseudo orchestral epic sweep-scapes. Definitely not Baker Street.

What’s inside?

Saxophone x 2 – 4 octaves of baritone and alto saxophone long looped notes – 6 velocity layers
Tape Saxophone – 4 octaves of baritone and alto saxophone long looped notes – brutalized through Roland Chorus Echo RE501 for lots of wow and flutter – 6 velocity layers
Honk – 4 octaves of baritone and alto saxophone staccato notes – 5 velocity layers
Harmonium – binaurally recorded portable harmonium with looped BPM synced bellows pumping.
Pump Organ – binaurally recorded church style pump organ.
1140 24bit samples = 2.46GB with Native Instruments’ propriety compression
Note Jitter – randomises note on/off timing , velocity values and tuning between articulations
Chord and Key quantise – selectable to fix scale and chord type across all keys
Sample start and loop length control per articulation
All controls fully automatable
BPM synced pan and volume modulation per articulation
BPM synced vibrato and chorus per articulation
24 custom convolution reverbs per articulation
4 insert effects – dirt, eq, rotor, phaser and master algorithmic reverb
2 send effects – delay and algorithmic reverb
Keyboard Velocity and Round Robin modelling page
55 instrument snapshots
Handy build in instructions in RTFM page