A few posts ago, I deconstructed the Yamaha MOX (Motif XS) tenor saxophone patches. The article summarizes the waveform assignment and Expanded Articulation (XA) control for each element within a preset voice. I’m not going to dive into the basics here, so I recommend reviewing the article for background information on XA and its behavior.

The blog entry covered the MOX (Motif XS) tenor sax presets, but not the newer Motif XF (MOXF) presets. The XF series workstations have two additional waveforms:

1. Tenor Sax2 Growl
2. Tenor Sax2 Falls

bringing the XF up to the level of Tyros/PSR Super Articulation tenor sax voices. This article deconstructs the “Tenor MAX” preset which makes use of these additional waveforms. The analysis is relevant even in the Montage era because the Montage tenor sax is based upon the XF waveforms (no update in the new model).

Pushing the main topic aside for a moment, Super Articulation 2 (SArt2) voices are a whole different technology and even to this day, the Motif and Montage do not implement SArt2 voices. SArt2 seems to be a premium feature that is reserved for Tyros. SArt2 requires realtime analysis of playing gestures and computation which is beyond basic AWM2 synthesis.

The table below gives the waveform, key range, and velocity range for each element in the “Tenor MAX” patch.

    Elem#  Waveform            XA        Notes   Velocity
    -----  ------------------  --------  ------  --------
      1    Tenor Sax2 Soft     AllAFOff  C-2 G8    1   79
      2    Tenor Sax2 Med      AllAFOff  C-2 G8   80  110
      3    Tenor Sax2 Growl    AllAFOff  C-2 G8  126  127
      4    Tenor Sax2 Hard     AllAFOff  C-2 G8  111  125
      5    Tenor Sax2 Hard     AF2 On    C-2 G8    1  127
      6    Tenor Sax2 Falls    AF1 On    C-2 G8    1  127

When the AF1 and AF2 buttons are OFF, one of the first four waveforms are triggered based upon the key velocity. The four elements cover the dynamic range from soft, through medium, through hard, all the way up to growl. The AF1 and AF2 buttons select particular waveforms depending upon the player’s intention. When AF2 is ON, all key velocities trigger the hard waveform. When AF1 is ON, all key velocities trigger sax falls.

So, bottom line, the “Tenor MAX” programming is just about what I expected.

I hope the analysis of tenor sax programming has helped you to understand XA and Motif/MOX voice programming. If you’re a Tyros/PSR player, then I hope that this analysis has helped you to understand a little bit of the technology beneath the Super Articulation voices.