Carl Dershem wrote:
Darcy James Argue wrote:
Hi Craig,
The range is realistic -- jazz tenor trombone players almost never
have an F attachment. I am sure the players they sampled for the JABB
trombones did not have an F attachment on their horn.
Hm. About half of the ones I work with (and have worked with in the
past 30 years) have.
cd
I think that we're into semantics and demographics here.
Darcy's comment may well be true for the full-time jazz
trombone players who form the show bands in Vegas and who go
on the road in the various configurations of big bands and
who are the first call players for recordings and movie/tv
work. However, I wonder how those trombonists would manage
with an arrangement where all the trombone parts include the
C below the staff, for example. Do they really say no
thanks to such gigs?
But there is a huge segment of the population which gets
played for paying (making them professional) but who don't
depend on such income for their sole support and who have
other playing gigs and/or day jobs to earn their income and
many of those have F-attachments.
I imagine Garritan went for the best full-time working
musicians in the fields they were trying to capture for the
various soundsets they're marketing, and so Darcy's comment
is most likely the reason that the range of the sampled
instruments is restricted as it is.
However, I would have thought that Garritan could think
outside the box a bit and realize that they would have a
much wider market for their products (their sampled sounds
are excellent, within the ranges they've sampled) if they
could have made their products a bit more versatile.
Sure, most of the top-tier jazz trombone players may not use
F-attachments when on jazz gigs (unless they're on 4th bone
parts) but I'm fairly positive that all of them would own
and feel comfortable playing F-attachment horns for those
gigs when they're required to have that extended range, and
they could have been sampled on those instruments. Or
Garritan could have done some programming magic and figured
out how to stretch the range. Soundfonts can do it.
That's the one thing that's been holding me back from buying
Garritan products. Having to spend $180 to buy the personal
orchestra only to find out that I would have to purchase
their JABB product also (for another $199) to get a more
complete group of instruments, only to find that in reality
I also needed to buy the Concert and Marching Band for
another $180 to get a truly complete library of sounds that
I might need in the course of my engraving work and
preparing demos. That makes it a $559 proposition,
something I wouldn't have suspected when I had bought that
first GPO product, if I hadn't been a member of this list.
Obviously Garritan is surviving quite nicely without my
money (other than the licensing fees that Finale and
Sibelius have paid them for the sounds they have included in
their recent releases) but I think that with a bit more
forethought and extensions of ranges, they could make a
whole lot more money from a much wider clientele.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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