Roland has introduced a new Digital Wind Instrument. Awesome!
All the saxophone sounds you need in one instrument
Nothing beats the sound of your favorite acoustic sax, but sometimes its tone might not be quite right for the job at hand. Whatever scenario you’re playing in, the Roland Aerophone AE-10 has the onboard digital sax sounds you need. Choose from alto, tenor, soprano, and baritone sax types that all respond just like their acoustic counterparts to your playing dynamics and articulation, thanks to Roland’s advanced SuperNATURAL modeling technology. Alongside individual sounds, you can pull off a seamless performance with the Full Range feature, automatically switching between sax types by key range.
The Aerophone is definitely a very nice choice of a controller for the fact that it translates your sax fingering technique perfectly to new sounds – other than your acoustic sax. It does this for clearly less money than the Synthophone – which had been doing this already successfully for decades.
However, I’d like to give you folks some warning about its “current” quality as a MIDI controller. While doing an adaption for the XPression I found lots of issues with the MIDI signal coming from the AE-10.
Below is a link to a PDF that I wrote to give you some more insight about it.
It’s IMPORTANT to know that this is at the current software state of v2.10 of the Aerophone. The MIDI output should therefore most likely be improved with further software updates. This means that the contained information should be carfully reevaluated after further updates have been provided by Roland.
http://www.dynasample.com/downloads/Aerophone_setup_for_use_with_the_XPression.pdf
If you know about manipulating MIDI streams this information could be rather helpful for improving the MIDI response of your Aerophone quite a bit.