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Wireless MIDI for just 8.99$

I recently bought the MIDI Jet Pro for my EWI,so that I send my melodies to my PC,my Yahama VL70-m or Roland SonicCell without a cable in between. I am quite satisfied with it,but admittedly I wasn’t very happy to pay $425 for the joy of wireless MIDI.

Now a cheaper alternative exists for whoever has an iPhone,iPad or iPod Touch. MidiBridge by Audeonic costs only 9 bucks and offers much more than any hardware MIDI wireless system. (I should add “theoretically”because I haven’t tested it yet…)

In short,MidiBridge works as a virtual MIDI patchbay:it takes the MIDI data entering the iPhone/iPad/iPod and sends it to a PC,Mac or another iOS device that sits on the same wireless network. This is where the similiarities with a hardware wireless MIDI device ends,though,because there is a lot more.

  • You can dispatch (clone) the MIDI data to multiple devices,withouth the need of dedicated hardware
  • You can analyze input MIDI data and send it to different devices depending on their MIDI channel
  • You can filter out MIDI data based on several attributes,such as Control Change values,aftertouch
  • …etc. etc.

The vendor claims that the latency is very low with hardware devices and is in the range 3-8 milliseconds with CoreMIDI networking (RTP). Of course,your iOS device needs to be equipped with a MIDI interface (e.g. Line6 MIDI Moblizer,IK Multimedia iRig,or the camera kit if you have an iPad),but if you are a musician and own an iPhone,odds are that you already have them.

As an EWI player,I guess the most natural use of MidiBridge is with the iPhone or iPod Touch,which can be connected to the EWI and still be carried in a pocket or arm band. The iPad is a bit too large and heavy for that. Also,if you want to connect your MIDI instrument to an expander instead of a computer you need another iOS device (including an iPad) that sits near the expander.

BTW,Audeonic has another interesting MIDI app named MidiVision,which allows you to monitor MIDI data flowing into your iOS device. Very useful if something doesn’t work as expected and you need to understand why.

September 28th,2011 | Category:EWI 4000s,iOS,MIDI,Software,Windows,Yahama WX5 | 7 comments

Fingering diagram builder

I wish I had discovered this great tool a couple of months ago,when I built the fingering charts for the normal and altissimo register.

The Fingering Diagram Builder,courtesy of Bret Pimentel,is an online tool that allows you to create a fingering chart for a variety of woodwinds,including saxophone,clarinet,flute,oboe,and recorder,plus the AKAI EWI 4000s and Yamaha WX5. You can select the key size and colors,and you can save the image to your computer or your Dropbox account.

The most serious limitation to date is the fingering diagram builder doesn’t support any version of Internet Explorer,even though it should work fine on most other browsers. For sure,it works great on FireFox.

You can learn more about the fingering diagram builder in these blog posts.

August 16th,2011 | Category:EWI 4000s,Miscellaneous,Software,Yahama WX5 | 6 comments

EWITool,the “other”EWI 4000s editor

The Akai EWI 4000s comes with 100 presets which,quite frankly,don’t do justice to its internal synt. There are just a handful of patches that are really playable,and none of them vaguely resemble an acoustic instrument,including those that are relatively easy to reproduce with a synt (e.g. clarinet or recorder).

Short of using an external expanders or computer,for us EWiers the choice has always been between these two options:

1) purchase the fantastic Patchman Music EWI4000s collection of sounds by EWI guru Matt Traum
2) create your own sounds with the Vyzex UniQuest Editor that you can download from AKAI website,available for PC and Mac.

(Incidentally,if you don’t have the Patchman collection you are leveraging only a small fraction of the EWI 4000s potential,thus you should order a copy as soon as possible from Matt. At 90$ it’s a bargain.)

However,if you are looking for “that specific sound”and even the Patchman collection doesn’t have anything like it,your only option is to built the patch yourself with the Vyzex editor,which isn’t exactly fun. Or at least,I always found it a bit counterintuitive and unnecessary difficult to use.

Only recently I discovered a third option,in the form of an alternative,open-source EWI 4000s patch editor named EWITool,which you can download from here. Its author Steve Merrony did a great job,and the fact the the documentation is very concise is just another evidence of how simple the software is.

Obviously,to use it at its best you still need to understand how the EWI oscillators and filters work,but in general everyhting seems simpler than with the other editor. By the way,there are two versions,for PC and Debian (but I tested only the former).

EWITools has several neat features,including the ability to load and save all the 100 patches in the EWI,a clipboard where you can store as many patches as you wish (and the clipboard is preserved between sessions!),the creation of multiple libraries,and the ability to work with SYX and BNK files,including single-patch SYX files. Plus a few unique features,such as

  • the ability to create random patches,either from scratch or by randomizing some parameters of an existing patch
  • the ability to “merge”two patches,to create a sound that combines the characteristics of two patches
  • easy acccess to the EWI Patch Exchange.

EWI Patch Exchange was an attempt to create a “marketplace”for EWI players wishing to exchange (for free!) their favorite patches. Unfortunately this attempt should be considered as a failure,because after 3 years there are only about 20 patches in the marketplace,and there haven’t been any new items in the last year. But it’s there and it might resurrected when needed. If nothing else you can find a few new sounds for your EWI.

It seems that –like the EWI Patch Exchange –EWITool is a “dead”project that hasn’t been updated since 2008,which is a real pity because it was a very interesting project. At any rate,the source code is available and maybe not all is lost,because some other developer might pick it from there. Regardless,even in its “current”version 0.6,EWITool is an editor that all EWI players should have at hand.

 

 

August 10th,2011 | Category:EWI 4000s,Software,Windows | One comment