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HI,
A friend just got his midi saxophone and asked me what would be the best as a sound expander. In softwares, I told him about edirol orchestral and the yellow tools forthcoming saxophone, but I think he preferes a hardware expander.

Anyone knows what would be nice for him ? I think the sax expanders are not made anymore by yamaha but I'm not sure....
Anyone can help ?
thanks

The VL-70m is still made, and can also be found for relatively cheap on ebay or alike.

Pretty modelization of wind instruments, made expressely for wind controller.

Pretty cool sound

a good modulation matrix is important, so you can assign several (!) parameters to each breath and afterouch.
I was always tempted to buy a Nord Micro Modular for that purpose - now that they sell out around 300 bucks.
But don't laugh, the old Yamaha DB50XG works great in connection with a shareware called XG-Gold (turns the card into a QS300)

cheers, Tom

The Yamaha VL70-M is a fantastic little hardware synthesizer. Half the presets are intended for midi wind instruments and the other half to be played on a keyboard. It is a physical modeling synthesizer specifically designed for wind and string sounds. It has nice acoustic bass sounds.

plus the vl70m is easy to carry to come to my place
he only has a laptop so audio cards like the db50x is not possible...
I think he is already looking for a 2nd hand vlm70... I will let you know...

I wouldn't want to talk him into the DB50XG, beware of that
but actually the thingy is an expander, just without powerlines and midi.
+5V, + - 12V and an optocoupler for midi-in is all that's needed
Of course it's the XG-Gold software that finally does the trick.

cheers, Tom

+5V, + - 12V and an optocoupler for midi-in is all that's needed

lol, easy !

no need to DIY - Yamaha has a little box called MU10XG which contains exactly the DB50.
Just stumbled across one on eBay

cheers, Tom