Review:  Akai EWI 1000 / EVI 1000 and EWV 2000 By Tim Tully Rumor becomes reality: mass-market wind to MIDI is finally here. Our ace resident saxophonist checked out the initial entry in the field, and once we tore him away from the Instrument, he filed the following in-depth report.

Concerning the first point mentioned above-expressiveness-without exaggeration the EWI has the potential to change the face of recorded music. The second point, at least for this sax- playing MIDI fan, is nearly as exciting a prospect as finding undiscovered tapes of unknown Coltrane-Dolphy sessions. At last I may be able to play into my sequencer, not just stumble along with my inchoate keyboard chops-and turn off the step-entry function forever. Regarding production and economics, the more I work with this instrument, the more I'm impressed with its potential, and potential is about the best deal you can get anywhere.

 

The Three Questions It seems to me there are three major questions to ask about the EWI, or any instrument that claims to do what the EWI does. First, does the ability to play the sax (or other woodwind) help a player to get functional on the instrument? Notice that I'm no asking the instrument to play exactly like a saxophone. I think it's reasonable to expect new instruments-and that's what this is-to require a player to learn some new techniques (just as piano players have to develop some new chops to play a synthesizer keyboard to its full potential). But taking that into consideration, the instrument should nonetheless offer the sax player a good deal of comfort and familiarity. The degree to which it fails to do this without offering some tradeoff (additional control over the sound or some other capability is the degree in which an instrument will fall short. The second question is: does the instrument respond musically when asked to do so, and how well? Will it put out the wide range of "expressive" control offered by wind instruments- from subtle nuances of pitch to the broad-stroked timbral changes-over the tones it generates? Does it really have the potential to play music that sings along the breath, embouchure, tonguing and the many other vocal sorts of controls that make the sax, for example, the unique instrument it is? Third, how fully does the instrument give the sax player an entrance to the world of MIDI? Does it off a way for someone with sax chops to not only blow hot fusion-bop lines in a session, but to do the rest of the things-and in some cases more of the things-a fully MIDI- fied keyboardist can do? Can it control other synthesizers; play chords; and control sequencers, signal processors, and drum machines?

For All You Brass Players... Despite this reviewer's obvious bias towards overt saxuality, the Electronic Valve Instrument not only exists but did so prior to the EWI. (Harumph.) It too is married to the EWV2000, and their relationship is identical to the one EWV enjoys with the Electronic Woodwind Instrument. It's just that the valve instrument talks to it differently. Its fingering is, of course, like that of a trumpet, in that there are but three keys on the front (or "top," from the brass player's point of view), and an object on the end of the instrument that looks, for all the world, like a large-sized tuna fish can. This device (called a "can"), is held by the player's off hand (the one not on the keys). A metal ring on the can drops the pitch a fourth when touched, emulating a trumpet's mid-octave embouchure change. Rotating the can moves the player's thumb along the rollers to produce octave changes of the same range as the EWI's. As opposed to the EWI's vibrato, the sensor in the EVI's mouthpiece produces a glide effect. The EVI's vibrato comes from rocking one's thumb on the vibrato control near the "earth plate" (like doing a "shake" on trumpet).

Any of the alternate (non-keyboard) MIDI controllers that are beginning to emerge can be evaluated this way. But before we look at the first question, a word on the instrument itself.

Sax In Drag, Electronically

The EWI consists of two pieces: a controller and the synthesizer it controls. The controller- the EWI 1000-is the thing you actually blow into and finger and play almost as if it were a sax or one of the other woodwinds. It is a metal box about 17 inches long and an inch and a half square, weighing a negligible few ounces. In place of the standard keystacks, onto one side (the front, if you will) are screwed a row of six rings that look exactly like chrome plated Lifesaver candies; six pencil-thick metal tabs-five of which emulate a woodwind's fifth-finger (pinky) keys, a sixth that raises any note a half-step; and one crescent-shaped bar between the "B" and "A" Lifesav...uh, keys. These are all non-moving parts and respond simply to being touched (more on this later).

At the bottom of the EWI's opposite side is the jack for the cord that connects to the EWV 2000 and a "cord clutch" (thank you). This is to take the brunt of other band members stepping on your cord as you begin to walk, freely and mic-less, around the stage. Above that, in place of the thumb rest, are four metal plates (again, non-moving): one above the thumb for upward pitch bends; one below it for downward bends; one controlling portamento ("glide"); and the "earth plate".

The "earth plate" has nothing to do with planetary mechanics or residual hippie mentality, but rather, uses the British term "earth" where we American types would say "ground". The manual exhorts us to "always keep (our) right thumb (on the plate) when...playing", presumably to insure that the capacitive touch plates work as intended. Farther up, looking like it should be the thumb rest, is the tab to which you hook your neck strap, and above that, a row of eight rollers that change octaves as you roll your left thumb up and down along them. Finally, extending about five and one-half inches above the metal body is a plastic piece ending in a flexible-plastic nipple consisting of two connected tubes, the right-hand one has a small hole in its top. Into this, we blow.

It's All The Same, But Different

The key setup, going downward from open C#, is identical to that of a sax but for a couple of fingerings, and alternate fingerings, on the two left-hand and three right-hand pinky keys. These keys-low D# through low A#- are useful and easily mastered and, by the way, can be played in each octave, not just the lowest, offering a convenient alternative fingering. The only problem this setup gave me was that the keys respond at the slightest touch, so if you're used to resting your fingers lightly on open keys-normally considered good technique-you have to lose that habit right away, or hear a lot of falsely triggered notes whenever a finger brushes against an "open" key. this is a pain, but not the end of the world. Nyle Steiner, who invented the EWI (see sidebar), said he'd advised people who'd been bothered by this to paint the keys with clear nail polish, somewhat desensitizing them to touch, but the people had all grown used to the EWI before getting to the cosmetics counter, and no one had ever actually tried it.

The octave rollers are another story. My left thumb does not believe it has eight octaves available to it; it wants to go up one, then back down. No more. It's hard for me to play fast through mare than two octaves and make that thumb just keep grabbing for more. But aside from my bad personal habits, the EWI's range is one of its great features. Having eight full octaves under your fingers is a powerful thrill; one that's absolutely worth re-educating your fingers for.

Still, there are some unfamiliar quirks in this feature. I find myself triggering false notes when changing octaves, especially downward. Tonguing every octave change helps but adds a limitation to expressiveness. I'm told the instrument's circuits sense the speed at which the fingering changes (if this is a change from D# to the C below it, we're talking six fingers and a thumb) and one's fingers soon get fast enough to play the octave changes smoothly. Judging from some of the demos I've seen, I tend to give this theory no small credibility, and plan on spending more time in the woodshed very soon.

The mouthpiece is weird, but workable. though the many parameters of the sound do respond to your blowing harder or softer, your air doesn't actually go through the mouthpiece. It's more like trying to blow up a lead balloon-no give at all-so you have to keep your embouchure loose enough that air escapes around the sides of your mouth. Another difference from "normal" mouthpieces is the way one does hard tonguing ('ta-ta-ta") and staccato tonguing ("tat-tat-tat"). These have to be attacked on the roof of your mouth, not on the mouthpiece itself; double-tounging ("ta-ka-ta-ka") works too. Emulating the way an acoustic instrument's reed responds to varying lip pressure by producing vibrato, the parameters of the Vibrato feature are sensitive to changing pressure on the mouthpiece. Gently biting, then releasing with your teeth, will produce vibrato, a tremolo, or modulate the filter level or the pulse width, in any combination you set. Do it faster to increase the effect's speed; do it harder to increase the effects depth. You can't get the exact shadings or the entire palette of nuances that come even from lightly running your tongue along a sax reed, but the Pulse Width Modulation can be haunting and the filter sweep a powerful effect. This is definitely a strong point.

Since the mouthpiece responds to motion-changes in embouchure pressure-it's not effective for a single bend, a "scoop," or other non-vibrato pitch changes. For this, two small metal plates-one just above and one just below the right thumb-work just fine. A knob on the EWV's panel, along with one of the parameters of the Vib/Bend button, set the depth to which you can bend. Once these are set, the more of a bend plate your thumb covers, the more the pitch goes up or down, stays there if you hold it, and comes back if you let it go.

And speaking of your right thumb, a quick roll to the left of its normal position on the earth plate lets you touch the "glide plate", producing a portamento effect, where the pitch slides smoothly from one note to next. The depth and duration of this effect are also programmable, and the more area of the plate your thumb covers, the greater the effect. Overall, this is the most accessible and most intuitively controllable portamento I've ever worked with on any synthesizer. Unlike keyboards, where the portamento control is always somewhere away from the keys, this control is right there, in whatever dosage you want, and your fingers never leave the keys. Very nice.

Hold Your Breath

The feature I was most eager to see implemented was breath control...no, not breath control, but Breath Control, as in getting a living, breathing, musical response from living breath.

A reed player's breath provides control over an enormous number of sound parameters (usually thought of as one phenomenon-"tone"-by the player), but to implement such power in an electronic instrument requires a huge amount of engineering. Multi-stage envelope generators approach recreating these effects, but in a stiff, predictable way.

What's been done here is clever and effective. The EWV 2000 does have one standard four- stage envelope generator (EG) apiece for each oscillator's VCF and VCA, but they seem vestigial, left over from an earlier evolutionary stage. More to the point, about 20 seconds of button-pushing is all it takes to defeat the EGs and set the levels to which the intensity of your breath will affect volume, filter cutoff, resonance, pitch, or pulse width modulation-once again, in any combination you want. You can blow in a slow crescendo and the sound will swell from silence to ff, follow any number of decrescendi and crescendi you care to blow, then fade to silence again-all with perfect smoothness. If you want to play the very next note staccato, there are no buttons, no sliders, no problem. Hit it hard, then cut the air of sharply, just like normal, and you get immediate attack and immediate release. To create more complex effects, add some filter sensitivity, a touch of resonance-whatever's not covered by embouchure pressure, perhaps-and you can blow the sweetest string lines, hot preachin' blues, or even give life to the "Ahs" and "Ohs" in your sampler.

To have such a range of attacks, swells, bends, effects and releases immediately available, without having to turn the knobs or hit the buttons or move your hands from the playing position in this middle of a performance, is essentially unheard-of in synthesis. If no other sax simulation had been successful in the EWI, I would see it as a powerful tool just by dint of its response to breath control. Taking into account all the rest of its capabilities, the EWI begins to look like a contender.

The Synth

The required companion to the EWI, or EVI if you're a valve kinda player, is the EWV 2000, a 4U rack mount (it can also stand on a horizontal surface), two-oscillator, analog synthesizer with an eight-octave range using four waveforms: sawtooth, square/pulse, triangle, and saw plus triangle. The oscillators can be synched; tuned from on cent to four octaves; and oscillator two can modulate the frequency of oscillator one to produce metallic sounds. Each oscillator can be separately high-and low-pass filtered and shaped by its own four-stage, keyboard tracking, ADSR envelopes (one each for both filter and volume). The EWV 2000 holds 64 sound patches that can be off-loaded to tape cassette and replaced with your own patches. Overall, the EWV is a fine-sounding analog synth (it uses the same oscillator chip as Akai's AX60 and AX73 synthesizers), with the addition of specifically tailored controls that give good, sensitive breath control over pitch, volume, and low-pass filtering of its sound.

Programming patches will require a learning curve if you're unfamiliar with synth basics (if you are, see the Nov. '87 EM for Craig Anderton's lucid introductory "how to" on analog synthesizers), but programming the EWV 2000 will be a snap for anyone who knows basic analog synthesis. The only surprises are the extras, and they're gravy; two high pass filters and two trigger modes. There's also a "compare" function that switches between a patch and its edited version; this is real helpful when you're modifying a patch. A "backward" button steps you back to the last parameter displayed, ameliorating some of the clumsiness of programming with a smallish (16-character) LCD. More help in this realm comes from eight knobs on the panel (yes, real, physical knobs!) that let you control such performance-oriented functions as breath sensitivity and vibrato, pitch bend, and glide parameters without going through the clumsier edit screen while you're playing.

Three features make the EWV2000 not only unique, but uniquely appropriate to working with a wind controller (limited to the EWI and EVI, due to the non-standard, non-MIDI cable that connects controller to synth-so don't start thinking those interfacing thoughts just yet.) Two of these features come in the MIDI section below, but the third has to do strictly with the EWV2000.

The Formant Filter

One of the things that gives strings and woodwinds, among other acoustic instruments, their characteristic sound is that they naturally resonate more strongly at one given frequency (a formant frequency) than others. (See Jim Johnson's "The Lost Art of Synthesis" in the Jul. '87 EM for a fuller explanation and bibliography of this phenomenon.) Press button number eight, the "effect" button, on the EWV2000, and you'll get the choice of setting a filter to "1" (recommended for string sounds), "2" (for bassoon-type timbres), or "3" (both combined). This filter adds a fixed-frequency resonance to any of the EWV's patches you want, and does amazing things to certain timbres. It's effect is quite apparent as you play a melody line at and around the formant frequency which, especially with wind- and string-type patches, creates strikingly realistic, non-synth-like textures.

But Does It Speak MIDI

The EWV2000 has but one MIDI port: an Out. Through this, on any one of the 16 MIDI channels, it sends other MIDI devices the information you'd reasonably want it to: Program Change (can be disabled), note data, Velocity (this is curiously fixed at 40H or 64 decimal, the common default velocity value for non-velocity synths), though Akai says a new software release will make it programmable), Pitch Bend, and one of the following continuous controllers: Channel Aftertouch, Breath, or Volume. A threshold parameter interacts with the Breath control to se the sensitivity of the MIDI output to your breath.

With these the EWI/EWV team controls one-note-at-a-time firing of other MIDI devices pretty well. However, of the three Continuous Controllers - Aftertouch, Breath, and Volume - only one can be active at a time. At the very least, this requires you to be especially careful in choosing the additional MIDI synths you'll want to control with the EWI. Since you expressiveness after you attack a note is limited to one MIDI controller, it's important that your external synths respond to what the EWI sends.

Two of the unique functions mentioned earlier are directly related to the EWV's relationship to the MIDI world.

 

The Man Behind the Instrument: Nyle Steiner Nyle Steiner, the inventor of the EWI and EVI, is a studio musician working in Los Angeles who has played his EVI on the soundtracks of such films as Apocalypse Now, Witness, Star Trek III, The Color Purple, and Fatal Attraction; the TV series Remington Steele and Knots Landing; and albums by Stephanie Mills and Neil Diamond. In 1980, at Ars Electronic In Linz, Austria, he won the award for the best new instrument. Originally a trumpet player, Steiner began developing the EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument) in 1965, and came up with his first working prototypes in the early '70s. By 1979 his experiments had produced a professional usable instrument, and before he teamed up with Akai, his Salt Lake City company had produced about 20 EWIs and several hundred EVIs. "I played with pitch followers and never did like that concept very well," Steiner said. Later, "when I first started to make an electronic trumpet my initial thought was to make something that responded to embouchure. But that wasn't too practical and so I decided to go with a different but related technique. The mouthpiece (used on the present Akai instruments) turned out to be better." His sense is that with the differences between the brass and among all the woodwind mouthpieces - sax, oboe, flute, clarinet - the present EWI/EVI mouthpiece serves all equally. In designing the EWV2000 synthesizer, Steiner and Akai concentrated on breath parameters, feeling it was better to build a synth module specifically for EWI/EVI controllers. As a result, the EWV's emphasis is less on Envelope Generators and LFOs and more towards its ability to assign breath control to its various parameters. Steiner began working with Akai in 1986, and feels that in developing his instruments, they have stayed very close to his "basic philosophy," and have even improved on some features, especially the software and programmability of the synth module. Incidentally, the one problem he expressed with the EWI was the manual instructing the player to use "lip pressure" on the instrument's mouthpiece and not to bite with your teeth. Steiner said you should use your teeth, not just your lips, to activate the mouthpiece sensor. As to the future, Steiner said he may do more work with Akai, but at the moment is pursuing his career as a studio musician, and contemplating making an EVI album.

One At A Time's Just Not Enough This is a so-near-and-yet-so-far function. You can se the EWV so that when you play certain notes, it will play chords on another MIDI synth. You can set these chords to include up to four notes, and set each note at any number of up to 12 half steps up or down from any note on the EWV. You can set each note to play a completely different chord. All of this is great. Allowing a wind player to actually play chords verges on curing the most noxious of the wind player's limitations: chronic pianist envy. But you can't shut it off. Once set, every time you hit a note that's chord-programmed, the chord sounds. This is fine for playing parallel harmonies, but it wouldn't let you play a single chord and let it swell or sustain behind you while you blow a line over it, and so on. Short of Akai doing an upgrade or some clever EM author designing a footswitch that would allow some sort of self-accompaniment technique, this feature remains a unique, flexible, interesting, almost-great implementation. External In This feature rates four stars. If there are limitations to the EWV's MIDI Continuous Controllers, this feature may solve them entirely, at least for live, non-sequenced performances. Connect the EWV's MIDI Out to another synth, then connect that instrument's audio out to EWV's External In. The breath control parameters you've set on the EWV - volume, filter cutoff and so on - will now affect the sound of the other synth in the same way, and the processed sound of the external unit comes out the EWV's audio out, mixed with any or no amount of the EWV's sound. With the right programming of the two synthesizers, this can give you a lot of music for your money. What this feature doesn't solve is the lack of a MIDI In port on the EWV2000. In going for the maximum breath-driven expressiveness, Akai chose to go with analog control. They believe the 127-step resolution of the MIDI Continuous Controllers is not fine enough to give the expressiveness over pitch, volume, and timbre provided by analog circuitry, and did not set the EWV2000 to receive MIDI data. So if you do sequencing and use the EWI, the lines you record can only be played back by external MIDI instruments. The expressiveness you gain thereby - their response to your breath - will be limited to either the MIDI Breath, Volume, or Aftertouch your EWI has sent the sequencer, and will suffer the limitations of the MIDI medium in playback. I understand Akai's point about the smoothness of analog controllers, but I wish they'd added a MIDI In to the EWV2000 and let me have the option. But within these limitations, for sequencing bass, lead, percussion and monophonic line, the EWI makes a fine MIDI controller for woodwind players, and offers a real liberation from the keyboard. Further, the chord function will let woodwind players lay down polyphonic parts in a sequence; again, without touching a keyboard. As long as you're content hearing the same inversion each time you hit a chord, this is certainly a step forward. In a multi-instrument, multi-effects MIDI environment, this amounts to the EWI showing more than a few abilities of a master controller, but not all, or perhaps even most. As always, there are tradeoffs, and a player's individual needs are the prime consideration. Conclusions What the EWI does, it does superbly. It feels like a woodwind instrument, though not exactly like any particular woodwind. It truly provides breath and embouchure control over its own - and to a lesser degree - other synthesizers; again, in both familiar and in some unfamiliar ways. Unquestionably, it enables a sax player to make music that would be impossible with a keyboard. Its MIDI implementation is less than I'd hoped, but by no means unworkable. I think we're going to hear a lot of EWI music in the next few years. Tim Tully is a much, much happier and well-adjusted member of society now that he can trigger MIDI instruments with something other than a keyboard. He laughs at people who say "I've got a really good sax patch I want you to hear."

© Electronic Musician Magazine, February 1988.  Republished here by permission.

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