
Here are my first few Nord Modular patches that might be of interest to others.

Note that my objective was not to emulate particular instruments, but to emulate the 
behavior of classes of instruments - in this case mainly woodwinds, but with some
characteristics of brass.  For example:

- real instruments have formant regions in their spectrums,
- Increasing volume increases the intensity of higher harmonics, 
- Increasing reed openness increases the intensity of higher harmonics, 
- The reed bends pitch more downward that upward, 
- There are richer harmonics in the attack of a slurred phrase,
- Slurred notes tend to blend from one to the next,
- There is a lag in the buildup of acoustic intensity,
- One of the patches also incorporates breath noise,
- etc.

I set up some general patch structures that included these capabilities and then
played with the settings until I liked the results, and I am pretty pleased with 
these.  They sound as expressive as any I've heard from a Yamaha VL.

These patches are all variations on one theme.  In the future I'll be experimenting 
with other more varied alternatives.

Perfomance notes:

- These all are set up to play in Eb, since alto sax is my home instrument. 

- They are designed for a WX5 set up as follows:
	- reed (lip) is set to "wide",
	- reed is set to Lip+ to send CC18 in addition to pitch bend
	- "lip gain" is turned to maximum, as this gives more midi steps as the reed 
	is moved, and is more subtle in responsiveness.

- These patches will play best on a full Nord Modular (or Rack), set to exactly two 
voices of polyphony.

- They should also work on a Micro Modular, but the smooth transitions of slurred
notes may be lost.  

- You can play with the knobs to change the timbre and reed response.  See the 
knob floater for the assignments.

- The modules in the patches have descriptive names, which should help you understand 
the design.

My to-do list:

- These currently just support the breath and reed (cc18) controllers.  I intend to 
experiment with the ability to control other sound characteristics with other controllers.

- Try other patch architectures.

- Try models for other families of instruments.


--- Chris Graham



