Remember: that was the first time I ever blew a note out of Wallander's interface. It was the demo with the controls locked down. In other words, that's the WORST I ever sounded on it, and it was 7 years ago.
Can anyone do it? With practice, yes. But yeah, it helps if you're a woodwind player. And it took me nearly 30 years of figuring out how to adjust sounds so that they play well via a Yamaha WX-5, so you can imagine how surprised I was when Wallander played that well "right out of the box."
That's why I have recommended Wallander so much, but the responses have been so negative that I keep quiet about it most of the time now.
Meanwhile, I have several complete string sets from VSL, including the new Dimension Strings, so I know what it's like to use trill samples, too. Frankly, at best VSL makes me feel like I'm in a straitjacket, expressively. But this latest set — Dimension Strings — is by far the best thing I've seen from them. I can almost get expressive performances from it. There's a lot that I don't know about VSL's interface, though, and I'm learning every time I use them, so that's getting better.
The best library for playing live, for me, was the Miroslav Vitous library. It responded easily to controllers without too many artifacts. It had its drawbacks, but you could create reasonable performance from it. When the guys from Albion Spitfire were being such asses about a question I asked, it was Miroslav that I used to put their demo in its place. Someone had recorded the flute intro into L'après MIDI d'une faun, and it was so bad that it made me wonder if expression was even possible on their instruments. So I asked how it was wired up for controllers, to see if my fears were justified, or if it was just a bad performance. They wouldn't tell me, and chose to respond with ridicule of ME for questioning their supreme judgment. I think somebody said that if I was so concerned, then post an example that was better. So I did. I posted three examples from three libraries, and they all were better. But the best one was from Miroslav. Here it is:
Debussy: L'après MIDI d'une faun; flute introduction with Miroslav Philharmonik's flute.
I'm not sure whether I used Miroslav or Garritan for the next one. Unfortunately, the file crashed, and I was never able to get it back. So, this is exactly what I recorded one night, with no hope of ever altering it. Of course... I could play it again.
JS Bach: Flute Partita in a minor, Allemande (2008)
Shooshie