I bought an EWI 4000s in July 2010. At the time I knew I'd enjoy playing it, but I really didn't know much about the instrument or how best to use it.
Ten years later I've learned a lot (though there's still a lot I don't know :-), and by describing my experience I hope I can help new players to get started, and perhaps to avoid some of the same mistakes I made. This page is long, but I hope people will find it useful.
...and sure enough, once I played it, I agreed that the internal sounds really weren't very good. Fortunately, Patchman sells a replacement sound bank for the 4000s which is incomparably better. This was my first additional purchase to go along with my new EWI. :-)
Here I ran into a couple of blind alleys. First I bought a Behringer Micromix MX400 four (mono) channel mixer. This isn't a bad product, and it wasn't expensive, but I don't use it anymore – partly because it's inconvenient (it requires AC power, and doesn't have individual mute buttons, so any time you mute a channel you lose its previous volume setting), and partly because most amplifiers and powered speakers have enough inputs to make the MX400 irrelevant.
Next, I bought a Roland Micro-CUBE 2-watt practice amplifier. The advantages of this unit are that:
The disadvantage is its tiny 2-watt output, which is enough to fill a room in your home, but not enough to play in public. I should have realized that when I bought it, but at the time it wasn't something I thought about.
More than a year later I discovered and bought Behringer's B205D powered speaker, which is also small and light, but puts out 150 watts. I wish I'd bought that originally instead of the Micro-CUBE (which I've since given to a friend who was looking for a practice amp to use while learning to play guitar; I'm sure she'll outgrow it in time also, but it was a quick and inexpensive way to start, just as it was for me :-).
Note that the Peavey KB 2 complements the B205D, but doesn't replace it. I actually bought this amp for performance purposes before discovering the B205D, and I still use them both in different situations.
...and ironically enough, I'm now considering buying the Micro-CUBE's bigger sibling, the MOBILE CUBE. :-) That's because there are times when it would be helpful to be able to perform in places where AC power is unavailable. The MOBILE CUBE is still relatively underpowered, but that's the price of running on batteries, and at 2.5 watts on each of two channels it's more usable than the Micro-CUBE.
...but I had no experience using the EWI as a controller for an external synthesizer, and thus had no idea what to buy. I decided to start with something that had good reviews, but wasn't expensive; in particular, I bought a second-hand Roland JV-1010 from a seller on eBay.
The JV-1010 has several banks of voices in read-only memory, which means they can be played but not modified – and they're designed to be played on a keyboard, so they don't all work very well with a wind controller, although some of them do.
...but there's also a bank of voices which can be modified, and Patchman sells a collection of voices for the Roland JV series which are designed to be played with a wind controller. I bought this collection at the same time as the JV-1010, in September 2011.
At this time the state of the art (for hardware synthesizers, at least) was still the Yamaha VL70-m, despite the fact that by then it was a discontinued product (Yamaha stopped making it in the summer of 2011) – but because it was discontinued, I had great difficulty finding one to buy. In February 2012 I was lucky enough to see a local classified ad from someone selling a second-hand VL70-m with Patchman's "Turbo" upgrade chip already installed.
...but at the time I bought the VL70-m, I had to find a way to combine it with the JV-1010 and EWI, in a way that allowed me to use them together with my then-new Peavey KB 2 amplifier. At that time I didn't have a rack case to put them in, and in fact hadn't yet learned that buying a rack case would be a good idea.
Instead, I put the JV-1010 and VL70-m into an old and otherwise unused attaché case, along with the then-resurrected Micromix MX400 mixer, which provided a way to tie the audio outputs from both synthesizers and from my mp3 player into a single input on the KB 2. This worked – sort of, anyway – but in hindsight it wasn't a good idea, it was just the only idea I had at the time. :-/
The two synths are both "half-rack" designs, which means that two of them sit side-by-side on a single shelf, occupying one level of the case (which has four levels available, which is why it's called a "4U" case; see this discussion of rack units if you're looking for clarification of this term).
The mixer and power distributor each occupy the full width of one rack unit, leaving one full rack unit empty; this is where all the cables are stored.
It was also around this time that I bought a RocknRoller "Micro" R2RT cart, both for rolling transportation for the rack case and KB 2 amplifier and as a place to put them during performances.
...which it did. :-) But I quickly learned that hauling the rack case around to weekly rehearsals wasn't going to be viable, and our rehearsal hall has stairs, so using the cart wasn't an option.
By then I'd been toying for some time with the idea of investigating the world of software synthesizers, or softsynths for short. I hadn't done anything about it yet, because it seemed like a lot to learn and my hardware synths were working well anyway – but suddenly I had a whole new incentive to find something smaller and more portable, and this seemed to be a good way to accomplish that.
Again some research was required, and in the end I bought a second-hand Lenovo laptop, a VST host program called Forte (since discontinued), and a number of softsynth voices from Sample Modeling and Wallander Instruments. I also bought a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 audio interface, which has several benefits:
I continued to use that configuration for just over a year. It worked well and sounded good, but:
I didn't want to remove the VL70-m from the rack case, but over time I began to miss it a lot; in October 2014 I found a second one (also with the Patchman chip already installed :-) for sale on eBay, and bought it.
Apart from being smaller, lighter and easier to set up than the laptop, it also has a much wider range of sounds (compared to the softsynths I'd already bought; there are many more softsynths out there, and it's certainly possible to assemble pretty much any instruments you want in this form – but a complete set of quality band and orchestral softsynths is a lot more expensive than the price of a VL70-m :-).
That brings things up to the present (for values of 'present' which equate to 'the last time this page was updated' :-). I don't know how the picture will change in the future, but I'm sure it will change; when it does, this page will be updated.
[ SMW, October 2020 ]