Woodwinds: Wind controller

Homemade EWI stand

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There are a few stands commercially available for the Akai EWI, and lots of folks have made their own or repurposed other items. I wanted one that was inexpensive and compatible with the Hercules stands I mostly use these days, and decided to try the DIY route. I came up with something workable but not perfect, so I’m sharing my finished project in case anyone is inspired to improve upon my design (please share!).

I built mine mostly from 3″ (~7.5cm) plumbing pipe and fittings. (I’m including some product links in case they are helpful, but mostly I was able to buy these things locally for much cheaper.)

I bought a 2′ (~.6m) length of pipe, but only ended up needing half of it.
Cut mostly with a hacksaw, and refined a little with some files and sandpaper. Good enough.
3″ end cap, with a hole drilled to fit the bolt. The bolt is 3/8-16 (imperial), which fits the peg sockets in my Hercules stands.
Disk cut from EPS foam (“styrofoam”) and hot-glued into place. This is where the end of the EWI will rest. (The pipe piece is shown here inserted into the 22.5° elbow.) I picked foam because it is lightweight and easy to cut to shape.
Bolt secured with 5-minute epoxy.
This nut will help lock the stand in place on the Hercules base, sort of.
I didn’t bother gluing the parts together, since they fit pretty tightly anyway and I’m considering this a prototype. Some paint…
…and some craft foam, secured with spray adhesive.
Works ok.

It’s more stable than it looks, even on this small Hercules base, because its center of gravity is so low. The end cap and elbow are heavier PVC while the taller part is made of lighter foam core pipe. As always, don’t leave instruments on stands any farther than you can sprint to catch them falling over.

Things I like about the stand:

  • It was cheap and not hard to make. The worst of it was cutting and shaping the foam core pipe, and someone with cooler tools than I have could probably make quick and accurate work of it.
  • Does work with the Hercules stands I already have. If you can figure out what bolt thread to use, you could easily adapt this to other commercial stand bases.
  • The instrument just rests in the stand, no clips or straps to unhook. Plus the whole upper key “stack” is exposed 360°, so the EWI is easy to grab even during a quick instrument switch.
  • No interference with any of the power/line/MIDI jacks.

Things that I don’t especially like:

  • On the 3-peg Hercules base shown, the stand has to be oriented as shown to stand up properly, which puts the EWI a little bit in the way of using other pegs on the stand. It works better on one of the larger Hercules stands, like the saxophone or bass clarinet stands.
  • Since the stand isn’t symmetrical like a typical flute/clarinet peg (because it leans 22.5°), it doesn’t always work to just screw it all the way into the base—it may end up leaning in an inconvenient or unstable direction. The nut helps lock it in place when it’s leaning the right way, but it’s fussy and not as secure as I would like (the stand tends to rotate a little if I bump it wrong).
  • It’s pretty chunky. I made a previous attempt to build this from 2″ pipe, which would work okay except that the EWI’s side keys protrude too much. (I did consider sticking with the 2″ pipe and making little cutaways for the keys, which could still be a possibility.)
  • The plastic-specific spray paint I used didn’t turn out well. I had trouble getting an attractive finish, and the paint tends to scratch off without too much effort. I’m not sure if the paint just isn’t well suited to these specific plastics, or if maybe it’s because I applied it in the extreme humidity of a Mississippi summer.

Anyway, this is a usable though imperfect design, and may be a jumping-off point for future versions by me or you.

A few thoughts on the new Roland Aerophone AE-10

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Don’t get me wrong: it’s great to see another company get into this space, and I hope they will seek to innovate further in wind controllers and push other companies to do the same. But Roland’s new Aerophone AE-10 seems like a misstep.

Interview: Sal Lozano, saxophone and woodwind artist

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Lately I have been enjoying Sal Lozano‘s recent CD, Everything’s Gonna Be Great (available from CD Baby and iTunes). The album is 13 charts by Tom Kubis for 5-piece saxophone section with rhythm section, and Sal plays all five of the saxophone parts. It’s a lot of fun, Sal sounds great, and there’s an all-star … Read more

ClarinetFest 2014 presentation: The 21st-century woodwind doubler

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I gave a presentation at the International Clarinet Association conference (“ClarinetFest”) last week on woodwind doubling, with a particular focus on the rising expectations on woodwind doublers to play more instruments at a higher level (including “world” and even electronic woodwinds). Here is the blurb from the program: The typical working woodwind doubler in the … Read more

Favorite blog posts, June 2014

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Hand-picked high-quality woodwind-related blog posts from around the web, June 2014 edition.

New sound clips: Faculty woodwinds recital, Aug. 27, 2013

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It’s time again for the annual post-mortem on my on-campus faculty recital. This year’s program was all Telemann, which was fun. Since some of my most formative years as a musician happened back when I was primarily a saxophonist, I still feel a little out of my depth with Baroque style, and preparations for this recital turned into a great opportunity to study, listen to recordings, and work on my ornamentation skills. (I found Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer to be invaluable, and it even has a chapter specifically on Telemann.)

I’m fairly pleased with how the A-minor oboe sonata turned out. My intonation has improved in leaps and bounds since I got some excellent reed advice at the John Mack Oboe Camp a summer ago (what a difference a change in tie length can make!). I did struggle a little bit on stage with the Mississippi Delta August humidity making its way into my octave vents, which you can hear in places in the following clip.

I have also been working on my double-tonguing on the oboe, and while it’s not perfect yet, I think it turned out quite well here. The fact that I wanted to use it on this piece probably belies some issues with my Baroque interpretation: it might have been more authentic either to slow down or to slur more, but I liked the effect and felt good about at least partially mastering the technique.

And, of course, it is great fun to play with harpsichord and cello. As we sadly do not have a full string faculty here at Delta State, I had to convince a cellist to come in from out of town. It’s scary to meet and rehearse with someone for the first time on the day of the recital, but the recommendations I had gotten for her turned out to be solid, and she played like a total pro.

I was determined to finally perform some recorder repertoire on this recital. My initial thought was to do the Telemann recorder suite, but since I already had the basso continuo lined up, I did some more research and discovered the delightful sonata in F major. The humidity had a fairly significant effect on this instrument, too, especially with me perhaps over-practicing on it in the weeks prior to the recital, so my tone and stability aren’t what I would have liked them to be. Too many cracked notes and response issues in the extreme upper and lower registers. Still, bucket list item checked off.

One definite doubling blunder: I went from oboe to recorder on stage, and wasn’t fully in recorder mode when I started the first movement. The recorder’s breath requirements are much lower than the oboe’s, and so I started off the movement with a rather ugly cracked note (not included in this clip…). But I am quite happy with how the slow movement turned out; here it is in its entirety:

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Faculty woodwinds recital, Aug. 27, 2013

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Bret Pimentel, woodwinds
Kumiko Shimizu, piano
Nicole Davis, cello

Works by Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767)

Faculty Recital
Delta State University Department of Music
Recital Hall, Bologna Performing Arts Center
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
7:30 PM

Program

Sonata in A minor for oboe and basso continuo, TWV 41:a 3 (c. 1728)

  1. Siciliana
  2. Spirituoso
  3. Andante amabile
  4. Vivace

Sonata in F major for recorder and basso continuo, TWV 41:F 2 (1728)

  1. Vivace
  2. Largo
  3. Allegro

Sonata in F minor for bassoon and basso continuo, TWV 41:f 1 (1728)

  1. Triste
  2. Allegro
  3. Andante
  4. Vivace

Fantasie no. 8 in E minor, TWV 40:9 (1732)

  1. Largo
  2. Spirituoso
  3. Allegro

Concerto in A major TWV, 51:A2 (c. 1728)

  1. Largo
  2. Spirituoso
  3. Allegro

Sonata I from VI Sonates en duo, TWV 40:118 (1738)

  1. Vivace
  2. Adagio
  3. Allegro

Notes

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) was a leading composer of his time, celebrated both critically and popularly. He is reputed as one of the most prolific composers of all time, with over 3,000 known works (count among his honors an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records). His output is not only staggeringly large, but also very diverse, sometimes to the chagrin of the churches that employed him; his operas and other secular projects were sometimes regarded as unseemly. Still, composers of the stature of Handel and J. S. Bach were students of his works.

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Problems of wind controller sounds for classical performance

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I’ve been working on a little Baroque repertoire on the EWI in preparation for an upcoming recital. It’s not especially common to play recital-type music on wind controllers—they are far more often used in jazz and popular styles—but I think the instrument has great potential for “classical” performance. (I mean “classical” here, and throughout this post, in the record store sense, not in the more specific musicological sense.)

My EWI is customized with the really excellent Patchman soundbank which seems to be more or less de rigeur for EWI players. It has 100 different sounds designed especially for wind controllers. But it has been difficult to find sounds that work well for me for the music that I’m trying to play.

Before I continue, I should pause to point out that I’m not at all criticizing the Patchman bank, which I’ve unabashedly recommended to everyone I know. These sounds are fantastic. And really, some of the ones that seem worst-suited to this particular application are some of my favorite ones that I’ve used in other situations.

There are also plenty of additional sources for sounds. I personally like the convenience of on-board sounds, rather than plugging into external modules or a laptop, though those are certainly viable options. I also am personally uninterested in playing sampled or acoustically-modeled sounds that attempt to mimic the sounds of “real” acoustic instruments; I want to play a synthesizer as a synthesizer, not as a substitute for something else.

So I’m looking for good synthy sounds that align with the aesthetics of classical performance. But many of the sounds that work really well for other styles of music have features that don’t fit classical music ideals of wind playing. For example, some of the sounds:

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A few more woodwind blogs you should be reading

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A few months ago I posted some of my recommendations for good woodwind-related blogs, and shared a couple of tips on getting the most out of your blog reading. I’ve got a few more favorite blogs I’d like to share today, and another blog-reading tip, too.

This time I came up with a blog each for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone, plus a bonus one. Here they are in no particular order:

Barrick Stees (Barry Blogs)

Barrick Stees is the assistant principal bassoonist in the Cleveland Orchestra, and a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the University of Akron. His blog is fairly new (started earlier this year) but is already full of good stuff. Professor Stees shares some insights on playing excerpts at a level suitable to one of the great American orchestras:

He also keeps a travelogue of his tours with the orchestra, and comments on other items of interest to professional or developing musicians, such as:

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Fingering diagram builder, version 0.2

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Two months ago I introduced the Fingering diagram builder, something that I hoped people would find useful for quickly and easily creating fingering diagrams for woodwind instruments. Since then, something over 1,000 fingering diagrams have been downloaded, which I think is a nice start.

Many of those have been saxophone fingerings, and I attribute this to some kind mentions among the saxophone-blogger community (thanks Doron, Eric, David, Neal, Alistair, and Anton!).

Now I’m pleased to announce the new-and-of-course-improved version 0.2. Go take it for a spin, or read on about the new goodies:

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