It's definitely trying to be an electronic saxophone, which for the most part it does really well. The AE-10 has a few sax instruments that don't have built in vibrato, which allows you to do realistic vibrato with the reed pressure and slurs dropping your jaw. I learned on clarinet first, so I have no problem hovering on the EWI, and playing with fingers touching on my sax (which I had to learn to do later). If you do that on an open hole flute, or a clarinet, you bend the notes pitch so you have to hover your fingers when not keying. Sax players get used to cupping the keys, even when not pressing down, because it leads to faster playing. The Glitchyness you describe on the EWI is almost certainly from you accidentally touching the sensors, and it's the hardest thing for sax players to get around. Of the few real instrument vst's I use, the ones I think sound the most realistic are Wallanders acoustic modelling suite which has no samples, and Sample Modellings "The Trumpet 3" which does use samples but still sounds amazing in spite of that. I use my EWI with several different synthesizers, most of which are not woodwind synths. The AE-5 has much less realistic sounds by itself, but it has wireless MIDI which lets it connect to your ipad or a laptop, which can run a much more realistic instrument. You can just pick it up, pick a sax sound, and it won't hurt your ears, but you'd never use it on a recording. For instance using bite for vibrato, and velocity for the filter, they are incredibly expressive.įor practice, the sounds on the AE10 are fine. Where they both excel, in almost equal measure, is analog and synthesizer type sounds that aren't trying to sound like a wind instrument. Their least interesting use is to play digital sampled instruments. And the non moving keywork allows for incredibly fast fingering once you get used to the sensitivity so you don't inadvertently trigger notes unintended.Īll of the AE and EWI sounds sound like toys to me. The advantage there is that when you need to circular breath, it's incredibly easy on the EWI.
Instead you're meant to let a certain portion of the air escape around your lips. The EWI also uses an extremely restricted airflow and it's not meant to "blow through" because the backpressure is so high. This isn't a problem for Clarinet, Flute, and Oboe players as we don't usually touch the keys continuously like Sax players do. The EWI is a great instrument, but it uses touch sensitive keys. The mouthpiece is also free blowing in comparison to the EWI. The Rolands have actual Saxophone fingerings and moving keywork which facilitate a sax style finger position. I own both so I'm talking from experience.
If you are primarily a sax player, then you don't want an EWI, you want the Roland AE-10 or AE-5. Even Rolands Supernatural instruments sound about 10 years out of date compared to what even the free computer vst's are doing these days. It doesn't have built in sounds it's true, but I've never heard any built in sounds that were worth a damn. So your choice to use the EWI with a PC, or not is up to you.
You simply install the software, run it, plug in the EWI, and you immediately get decent quality sampled instruments like Oboe, Trumpet, Trombone, Bassoon, Saxophone, Flute, etc.
It doesn't require a DAW like pro tools to use, although it contains a vst as well.
You can also directly plug it into the USB port (with otg adapter) of any Ipad or tablet, and use it to control instruments on it.įinally, the EWI comes with it's own software synthesizer for use with PC's and USB.
With any USB only instrument, including the EWI USB, you can purchase an inexpensive adapter which takes that USB plug, and translates it to a real 5pin midi out (with no pc required) which lets you plug it in to any hardware synthesizer you like, without the need for a computer.
Because of this, you lose the cheap "cd player skipping" sound of every note sounding the same like you get with sampled instruments. It uses virtual instrument modelling to create very expressive instruments that don't use samples, it uses math to create a model. Of the hardware based sound modules for woodwinds, the Yamaha VL series is one of the best.