I’ve called it “Wind Studies”, as it’s an exercise about orchestral wind instruments and the act of playing them, although it features only the Akai EWI4000S, that I borrowed from my dear friend João Figueiredo.
This is what it looks like:

It looks like a high-velocity train, but it’s an “electric wind instrument”, meaning it’s a MIDI wind controller developed specifically for wind instrument players: it uses breath control and a fingering mechanism similar to saxophones, clarinets, flutes and the like. The built-in sound module is quite interesting, but for this piece I’ve used SampleTank XL, instead.

The structure is simple:

• one “spinal chord” voiced by french horn, with a large sync’ed delay applied
• one bass texture, voiced by Miroslav Vitous‘ hornwind section (available in SampleTank XL)
• one solo line, voiced by clarinet

Everything is pure MIDI data, played by me on the EWI and voiced in SampleTank. The performance was recorded, sequenced and produced (barely) in my usual DAW, ProTools LE.

Despite appearances (and Michael Brecker’s endorsement), playing the EWI and playing the saxophone are tremendously different activities. And that’s good. What it also means, as far as I’m concerned, is that there’s a lot of technical study to be done, still.

But it’s a great alternative to MIDI keyboards, when I’m “sketching”.

I hope you enjoy this one. I did.