musical thoughts

At the polite urging from deathshadow from ewiusb.com, here’s my wrap-up of one month of time spent with my EWI. I’ve probably put a decent 80 hours of time on it (I wish it had an hour meter).

Some background crap that will help the following make sense:

I have been playing for a few years through a setup that uses Reaper as my VST host, a craptastic M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard as a controller (but I got it dead cheap off craigslist so I’m not too griped) and an Edirol UA-25 as my audio interface.

So prior to becoming a minty new EWIist, I already had grappled with and solved most of the problems related to performing VST instruments. Which is to say I figured out how to operate my audio interface and the ASIO drivers, plus developed a degree of facility in my host (Reaper) so that I am comfortable routing, editing, and processing midi streams.

I already have my ASIO buffers set up to give me a modest latency (14ms, which I know there are people who would find that unacceptable) given the performance constraints of my peecee. I am using a 5-year-old Dell box with a single-core Pentium 4 chip and 1.5GB RAM. I’ve learned that if I lower my buffers to improve latency, I will get audio degradation. This would be less of an issue on a higher performance, newer box. Either way, I play all day every day at 14ms latency, and it works for me. I don’t suffer from bad feel, and the latency compensation in my host is working to my satisfaction during recording. I look at it a lot like being 15 feet away from your monitor, and I’ve played in worse circumstances than that on many a stage.

So, my EWI experience centered around solving all the new problems of performance. Namely, what are all these damn keys for? My number one discrepancy was with the fingering system listed as flute. (make air quotes for me around the word flute, okay?) The fingering chart in the book helpfully points out that C is the “only” fingering that a flutist will need to relearn for the system, and that’s not such a big deal, kthxbye.

Well, how wrong. There’s no left thumb key on an EWI, instead you get octave rollers. So that’s a fairly major additional discrepancy right there. And there’s no meaningful trill key support in the flute fingering system, so a decent amount of music is flat-out not performable in this setup (keep that in mind, Bach fans). A good example is a trill between B and C or from C to D. It’s not doable. And the totally stupid part is that there are unused keys that may have been assignable here.

But, that’s about the only thing that left me seriously unimpressed. Someone needs to release a fingering editor, it’s obvious enough that the thing is software configurable. Here’s the rest of my random thoughts as a new EWI owner:

• My mouthpiece was broken. I didn’t even know it until I read deathshadow’s disassembly page (more on that in a minute). But the screw that holds it on was overtightened. So my mouthpiece is press fitted on and removable by just pulling on it due to a plastic failure inside that I couldn’t see. I emailed Akai through their site, and two weeks later got back a form that I have to fax in to get a replacement, but they should fix this under my warranty (it is very clearly a defect in workmanship, and I can fix it with the part). So on the plus side, it’s a smart design to have a replaceable mouthpiece.
• My key contacts are corroding profoundly from my perspiration. I can’t say how bad a problem this is, but my thumb plates are blackening up. I have this problem on flutes too though, so no real criticism, just an observation. I can’t imagine it would degrade the performance.
• I hate the neck strap (but come on, that’s easy enough to fix, so don’t consider that a gripe).
• I absolutely need to modify mine for increased airflow. I will hurt myself otherwise. But I will plan this out and execute it very carefully.
• Many, many VST instruments will not “play nice” by default with the EWI. But with some of the special parameter modulation features available in Reaper, I can work around that and really get a broad selection of software instruments to work.
• Reaper offers me midi learn parameter modulation of an extremely flexible sort. Essentially, I can take any continuous controller value generated by the EWI and map it to any performance parameter of any of one or more(!!) VSTs in my effects chain. This exposes serious possibilities and I’m just getting started exploring, but the most practical thing is to take a synth without an aftertouch parameter and map breath to master volume. It instantly makes an unplayable VST playable.
• I’ve seen a couple videos where people map the pitch bend plates to sustain and play chords. Note that this works way better on the USB EWI, since the 4000 EWI is only capable of two pitches simultaneously. I actually prefer to use a pedal, and I can set my host up so that a track with VSTs accepts midi input from multiple sources. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but stompin’ on a pedal works great and I don”t hurt my right thumb as bad.
• Oh yeah, that’s the thing–my right thumb. I have not found an ergonomic RH grip yet, and it worries me. I am stressing my right hand to an unacceptable degree. But I’m working on that too.
• Inside of my lower lip is taking a beating. I’m playing around with different “embouchures” to correct that though.
• The streams of CC data that it generates are thick and can possibly bog down the host. More about this in a separate post. My host lacks a CC thinning function, but so far it has not been a problem even on my crappy old peecee.
• As far as the Aria player goes, it is pretty much a decent (but limited in some significant ways) soundfont player. #1 gripe: you can’t set the pitch bend range for the sounds. #2 gripe: it’s not consistent. I was hoping this would be hackable by XML file edits but so far I can’t see that it will. I’m planning on looking into something like chicken converter to see if I can get in there and set the pitch bend range to a non-stupid value.
• MiniMogueVA, which is simply one of the best free VSTs available, works freaking excellently out of the box with the EWI, because it supports aftertouch. It’s not real flexible, but it supports it in a way that makes sens (it seems to be hardwired to filter depth, which is at least musically significant). More on this in some future articles/demos.
• I used to play a breath controller on the gig when I had a Yamaha DX7 back in the 80’s (I had hair then too). Much of the technique I use comes from that experience. I had to program BC support into my own patches, so I’m a) used to the obligation of routing breath control CC info, and b) frustrated when I can’t completely control it like in the Aria player. I do get that it was a smart thing for them to do to make BC data do some approximately “right” thing out-of-the-box so taht you didn’t get frustrated setting this up. But I want more, dammit.
• Because I want more, it’s really key to me that my host supports parameter modulation in the flexible way it does. I know I said it above, but this is a rocking feature of Reaper. If your host can’t do this, you won’t get all the juice out of your EWI.
• Spit comes out the bottom. It gets everywhere, I have to really pay attention to that.

In conclusion, here’s my Harmony Central-style review of the EWI USB:

Product: Akai EWI USB
Price Paid: $254 shipped from jrrshop.com

Ease of Use : 7
I should ding Akai more for their fubared installation media, but the controller is class-compliant, so that’s only a criticism of the bundled VST. Points deducted for making me use their crappy tool to configure EWI settings like bite sensor gain and breath sensor gain.

Features : 7
They did a decent balancing act of implementing features in software to keep the cost of the hardware lower, and I applaud that. Points deducted behind the alternate fingering systems being somewhat half-baked. I don’t miss the 8 octave range, that’s just a novelty feature on the 4000 series rather than musically significant.

Expressiveness/Sounds : 9
Aria player sounds better than I though it would having heard demos online. I want more dynamic range than it offers though. It’s a generic soundfont player too, so it’s nominally extensible, although there’s no guidance on optimizing a soundfont for EWI use, and frankly soundfont is a crappy format. Technically the thing is a midi controller, so sounds is based on the bundled player. The synth sounds in the bundled player are below average, but the real fatal flaw is that they can’t be altered in any meaningful way. The instrument sounds are really good though–you’d play close to the purchase price for this good of a VST instrument.

Reliability : N/A
I’m not going to judge it after just a month of ownership. But it seems well-designed and moderately well-built. Mine had an assembly flaw that caused a crack in the mouthpiece plastic (but this didn’t affect playability). Just careless assembly.

Customer Support : 6
They were a little slow to answer my online form-email from their site. I got an autoreply instantly on May 7, but the human-generated response email came May 11. Two business days I guess. And it still requires me to fax in my warranty claim (very 20th century). Support organization mentions that they handle Alesis, Numark, and Ion audio in addition to Akai Pro. Not very prestigious brands. I may change this rating depending how my warranty claim plays out, stay tuned….

Overall Rating : 8
I’m happier with this than with a lot of modern electronic music instruments. Which is to say, I’ve bought worse. I think it should hold up well and strikes me as very well designed. I think it’s good value for the dollar. It compares favorably in terms of features and capabilities to keyboard midi controllers in the price range.

I should take some pictures of the thing. I have opened it (as near as I could tell, the warranty didn’t seem to mention this) but not modified it in any meaningful way. More on that subject in a future post.