musical thoughts

Another EWI demo video, this one explores the whole idea of it being a generic midi controller.

Here’s the blab I wrote for the Youtube page:

Okay, like some previous commenters have noted, so far I’ve tended toward playing the ewi version of “real” instrument sounds. So here’s a very unreal sound for those of you who would like to hear something from the department of limitless possibilities with the ewi.

A few technical notes:

I am playing a free VST instrument called MiniMogueVA (very ewi-friendly), which aims to emulate a certain well-known piece of analog equipment. It does a shining job at this, and being a VST you get the added benefits of instant patch recall. This thing has been one of my favorite VST instruments since the day I found it.

I am performing my VST using Reaper as my host. With Reaper, I have a huge degree of flexibility of routing, both with audio and with midi continuous controller info. So in this setup, I’ve programmed a fairly classic hard sync lead sound on the VST, where two oscillators are used but one is only used to reset the period of the other. So far so ordinary, but the secret sauce here is that I am using the ewi breath control to modulate the tuning of the master oscillator in my sync setup.

What happens is an effect reminiscent of Tuvan throat singing–some crazy harmonics are generated and my breath pressure into the ewi is modulating these harmonics up and down so that I have *control* over this. and it starts to take on the aspect of countermelody even though it’s a monophonic synth generating it. Pitch of the slave oscillator is being determined by the midi note numbers that I’m generating with my fingering, but the overtones are coming from the breath controller CC messages, and are under independent control. These harmonics are not coming from an overdrive (like in an electric guitar), they are being generated by the hard sync of the two oscillators in the synth.

Now I can’t say that what I’m doing here is the most musical thing in the world. But it goes well beyond what’s possible with the sample-based emulation of the real instruments, and even the synth patches that ship with the ewi usb. And this is not a particularly complex effect chain, just one VST and some reverb. The performance possibilities become compelling when you can route different controllers to different VSTs in a chain.

But hopefully this demo should show a bit of the possibilities inherent in playing a software instrument from an ewi, especially within the framework of a host with flexible parameter modulation capability (other hosts can do this too).

Waaaay back in the fabulous 80s when I had hair, I used to play a Yamaha DX7 with a breath controller, and in that system you were pretty much obliged to write your own patches that did something useful with breath controller information (CC2). Routing CC2 to master volume is just pedestrian. All the Aria patches that ship with the ewi usb have this simplistic setup and are “ewi ready” in that sense. Other software instruments will ignore CC2 mostly. But with a host that allows you to map CCs to VST parameters, you can overcome that and make whatever effects you want happen.

Real instruments change timbre when you blow into them harder. The “real” instruments in the Aria software don’t really display this tendency much. But with a host, you can route things in a very innovative way. Sadly, Aria does not expose much useful to host automation. When you program your own patches for ewi performance, you can emulate acoustic overload like in a real instrument, or go way beyond.

This effect probably would be more successful if it were blended with a separate VST sound that was just the fundamental notes–the harmonics are overwhelming the melody that’s getting played here. But that’s also very easy to achieve; just add a second instance of the VST to the effect chain and use a patch that’s not doing the oscillator sync. Then mix the two timbres to taste. Here’s it’s all the way out front.

While this was uploading I did create that more moderate version of this patch also and it’s pretty successful.

I can hear a huge amount of aliasing on this, that’s my only real gripe–MinimogueVA doesn’t oversample (neither version does) so it would be necessary to implement this on a differentplugin to get rid of that. Aliasing is the whooshing noise you hear on the highest notes/harmonics–the digital oscillators are running close to half the sample frequency and it’s an error in the processing more or less.