Wind Controllers: WX7, WX11, WX5 by Yamaha

[Shooshie]

I'm another wind player. I use a WX 5 now, but started out with the WX7. When DP 5 came out with it's VI's, I spent a short time looking around for instruments that recognized cc2 and didn't find any. It's on my list to look for ways to program the DP VIs' for wind, but I haven't tried yet.

Does anyone have some experience programming DP VI's for wind controller?

Your best bet is to set your WX5 output to Expression Control (CC#11) and your Velocity to Fixed @100. Look at your little DIP switches under the WX5's body, just above the octave keys.

Switch 1-1 should be set to "ON." (ON position is toward the right side of the instrument) This sets the velocity to a constant rate of 100.

Switch 1-2 -- ON
Switch 1-3 -- OFF

These 2 switches, set as above, will turn your output to Expression (CC#11).

You may want to experiment with switch number 2-5, which is labeled "Fast." Turning it off may help you play notes with fewer incidental or accidental notes. Turning it on will make the WX-5 respond to every note that comes out of it, even if the notes are in between the notes you actually want to play. In other words, if your fingers do not go down together perfectly at the same time, you may get a few 'glitch' notes, or flams, or whatever you want to call them.

With these settings, you can play the majority of all VI's. The limitation is that all the notes will have a velocity of 100. (but infinitely variable in volume. Well... ok... variable within the 128 degree MIDI spec ) That is not necessarily a bad thing. At worst-case, you may want to go back and reshape the velocities of each note in your line. On the other hand, some samples are recorded at one layer, so it doesn't matter what the velocity is; they'll all play alike, anyway.

Shooshie

[syntonica]

I am curious about getting a wind controller and, of course, have to decide between the two. Unfortunately, one can't just pop down to the wind controller store and try them both.

Has anyone played both instruments? If so, what are some of the pros and cons about each?

I had one gentleman tell me of all his travails with his WX5, basically stating the thing was fussy, fussy, fussy and touchy to boot. He also stated that it needs a lot of care and feeding compared to a "real" wind instrument.

Can anyone enlighten me?

What I need: low maintenance, no fuss, no muss. The fingering system used is of no importance.

Thanks in advance.

[Shooshie]

I don't know the problems encountered by your gentleman friend, but his response makes no sense to me. The Yamaha WX-5 is just a MIDI wind-instrument. It requires no special care. It is the most evolved of any wind instrument I've seen, offering many options that make it compatible with the most sounds of any Yamaha offering to date. If you are a wind player, you already know how to play the WX-5, but like any wind instrument, it will take practice to learn its quirks and options. It has a LOT of options, and that's a good thing.

I don't know if AKAI's EWI is offering key-driven instruments yet, or whether it offers lip control. Previous incarnations offered neither. Vibrato was done with the right thumb; an awkward arrangement -- especially for people who already know how to produce vibrato with the lip/jaw. The WX-5 is compatible with traditional wind-instrument vibrato techniques.

Both brands offer programmable tone modules, but in this age most people are looking for something to drive their computer-based samples, such as Giga, MSI, Kontakt, MachFive2, Ethno, and all the native instruments in Logic or DP. Tone modules are irrelevant, limiting, and a little obsolete, though when reprogrammed they can offer some interesting sound patches. One needs to be able to drive them with Controllers #2, #7, and #11. The latter is most commonly used by the computer samplers for individual MIDI track control.

Someone else will have to defend the EWI; it simply has never caught my attention as an instrument that I would be interested in owning. My first exposure to MIDI-Winds was the Lyricon back in 1978, and the WX-5 is the direct descendent of its design, by evolutionary path of WX-7 and WX-11.

Shooshie

[syntonica]

Hey Shooshie--

Thanks for the incredibly quick response!

It was not a "friend" of mine, but a salesman at the guitar shop near where I live. Since he wasn't trying to sell me something, I figured he might be telling the truth, but it was so critical, I wanted to be sure. It sounded more like he was describing a Lyricon than a WX5!

I've read everything I can about both devices, including the manuals. I am now trying to get feedback from users with "real world" experience. I keep flip-flopping on my choice and need to know more.

Is there anything you would like Yamaha to fix in the "next" model? There seems to be a lot of plastic parts to the instrument. Do they hold up okay? do you find you ever use the pitch bend wheel on the right thumb? how is jumping the break with the left hand?

As a sidenote, the Akai seems to now have everything the WX5 has, just a different philosophy in how to implement it. The "mouthpiece" is a silicon thing liked a rectangular double reed that you blow in and it also has a "bite" sensor, as they call it. The keys are touch-sensitive pads rather than actual keys that you press, so it's more like a recorder or open-hole flute rather than a sax. The tone generator is built-in with 100 editable patches, which is kind of cool for just curling up in a nice warm corner with some headphones and noodling, but is not essential in my decision.

[Shooshie]

The new Akai may be all we ever dreamed of; I just haven't seen it other than in a video of Brecker playing it. But he liked the old EWI, too, and I did have experience with it. I didn't like it one bit! I like having keys. I like being able to touch the keys without actually "playing" them. I like depressing the keys, as on a flute or sax. A clarinettist or recorder player might prefer the EWI; I just don't know.

The WX-5 feels cheap, but it's held up to quite a bit of playing in the few years that I've had it. The WX-7s had to be repaired after about 3 years, but then they lasted a good 12 years or so. (I had two) The WX-5 is not metal like the WX-7 was, but I'm finding it to be so superior to the WX-7 that I could care less what it's made of. To add weight to it, I inserted batteries into it. That helps with the break fingerings.

Crossing the break... that's a complex subject, but the news is very good. There are many ways of crossing the break, and you will find them all to be natural, which is good because there are a LOT of octave keys. You have 3 octave keys in either direction, plus the open octave for a total of 7 octaves in playable range (piano has 7 octaves plus 3 notes). There is a transpose button above the thumb rest which enables you to shift the total range up or down by up to 3 octaves either direction, so your actual range on the instrument is pretty much the entire range of MIDI. You just have to live with 7 octaves of it at any given moment (most MIDI keyboards have only 5 octaves). Then you can pause, transpose, and continue to the rest of the range. I never have to do that, as very few patches have more than 5 octaves of range, piano being the main one.

Your salesman friend probably was referring to the fact that the WX-5 is so programmable. He probably tried pushing all the buttons without reading the manual. That would get you in a load of trouble, real fast! I think that a full-off-on reset will restore the defaults. Also, you have to program the DIP switches and potentiometers to adjust it to your way of playing. (basically 'set and forget') That takes time and patience until you finally get it like you want it. Then you don't have to do it again unless you want to experiment, or if your technique changes.

The pitch bend wheel is like any other mod-wheel. It just does its job. Well... that's not entirely true. It does MORE than most mod-wheels. It can be programmed to send other MIDI controllers for effects: specifically, controllers #74, and #16&17 (together, depending on the direction). Here are its parameters:
••• Normally it delivers Pitch Bend.
••• It can be set to deliver Pitch Bend when rolled downward, and Modulation Wheel when rolled upward.
••• It can be programmed to deliver Controller #74 with a value of 64 at its center "rest" position.
••• It can be programmed to deliver CC#16 when rolled upward, and CC#17 when rolled downward. These four settings cover practically any kind of setups you can imagine.

The Hold Key is also programmable to sustain a pitch, or to follow at a designated interval, or to produce a portamento effect.

There are many, many more features. Reading the manual is a must, so if you buy one 2nd hand, don't do so without a manual. Trust me. It's essential. It's not very long, but there are LOTS of options.

One of those options is fast/slow response. The Slow response is generally the best one. On the WX-7, one of the major drawbacks was that it played literally everything you fingered. That means that as you closed the keys down, the microsecond gaps between key closures meant that it produced little "flams" as the keys closed. They were generally too quick to be audible, but they played havoc with sequencers, which were fast enough to pick up all of them. The "slow" response allows a few-millisecond gap between notes, so that all the keys can close together. Having trained on a WX-7, I can use the fast response, but the slow response is generally adequate even for quick 16th notes or trills, so you may want to leave it on slow response.

The WX-5 is very well thought-out. I think Yamaha should be commended on listening to their customers. All my early complaints from the WX-7 days have been addressed in this version. I'm sold on it, and would not go back to my WX-7s even if I got them repaired. I need to buy another one of these for a backup.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

PS: I said 3 octave keys in either direction, but if you look at a picture you will only see 2 keys in either direction. That's because depressing BOTH keys constitutes the middle-octave in either direction. Seven octaves with only 4 keys. And it works almost without your even being aware of it. Very natural once you locate the keys and practice moving your thumb in their direction. The octave keys on the old WX-7 were MUCH harder to use both in layout and implementation. Very UN-natural. The WX-5's octave keys are vastly superior.

[spirit]

There is still a problem with "cross fading" velocity layers with volume increase- phase/chorusing effect when both layers are heard simultaneously. In a solo instrument this would be more noticable than in a section where the phasing/chorusing of multiple instruments will somewhat mask the "cross fading". Cross switching could be an alternative if there were a large number of layers with very subtle gradation between them. It is for these reasons that modeled instruments (Hence the VL70) can have potential to provide expressiveness, and even potentially a more accurate emulation, than sampled instruments.

Regarding string controllers, Godin makes a fretless nylon string with pretty good MIDI response that might work better for plucked strings than a wind controller, though for violin though the Godin possibly might do double stops and gliss more naturally than a wind controller, it wouldn't swell or sustain as well as a wind controller, unless someone bowed it(maybe when Jimmy Page's finger is healed?).

[syntonica]

It's good to hear that despite having some plastic, they hold up. I, too, tend to rest my fingers on the keypads, so having actually keys is probably what will swing me towards the Yamaha side of things.

However, I am still willing to hear from anyone who knows the Akai... anyone?

[HCMarkus]

I chime in as a long-time Breath Controller user, from back in the BC-1 DX-7 days to the present with my Motif ES. I have yet to purchase the FM card for my Motif, but did invest in the Physical Modeling card, within which I have about 6 tones I really like playing. In my opinion, FM responds much better to breath input than samples and filters. I used to love the DX-7 brass-like patches with breath control. I think the physical modeling card probably uses some FM, 'cause it sure sounds like the venerable DX with an added noise generator.

I was very disappointed to note that the newest Yamaha Motif synths do not provide a Breath Control input. Using breath, even with a keyboard controller (especially with aftertouch vibrato!) brings a whole new dimension to music.

[wheever]

Vaguely related idle question:

There's an ensemble for Reaktor named Steampipe that basically models pipes with air columns moving through them; what kind of instrument it sounds like depends on how you set the parameters--anything from flutes and saxes to, say the Alaska pipeline during a hurricane.

So my question for you wind players out there is: have any of you used your wind controller with Reaktor, and specifically this ensemble? If so, what are your thoughts?

Like I said, idle question.

[Shooshie]

I've been trying to program BC sounds in MachFive2, and in Logic's EXS24. It has been very disappointing. Logic's EXS sounds, so far, have truly been awful for that purpose. They make a terrible "banded" or "serrated" zipper sound during crescendo. I may simply have not hit upon the right combination of parameters yet, but it seems like it wouldn't be this hard. MachFive2, on the other hand, has a better sound, but it's been very tricky getting BC support out of it. I've learned that you can turn down the Velocity to zero for all layers in MachFive2, and that helps, but I haven't yet been able to create any sort of layer-switching techniques that work with BC. I don't know if it's a problem in the way I'm trying to write the rules, or if it just cannot be made to do it. Synth programming has always been tough for BC. Either a synth has it or it doesn't. Yamaha has generally allowed us BC control in their hardware boxes. Kurzweil has a fine implementation that allows all sounds to be run with BC instruments. But there is something missing. They work with Controller #11, and it's just not the ideal way to go about it. True BC sounds use CC#2, and they respond to its pressure with timbre changes as you blow harder or softer. Most sounds that you "hack" into wind-control status (usually using #11, Expression) sound like someone is just turning up or down the volume knob. Not real expression.

The hangup is that BC works opposite of keyboard sounds. Velocity screws up BC sounds. You need to be able to cut Velocity out of the sound. Keyboards have nothing else to work with, so Velocity is the de facto default in patch programming. Few platforms allow for turning it off and replacing it with something else. I had just made some progress last night in turning off the velocity in M5.2 when it crashed. It was late, so I quit. Hoping to get back to it tomorrow. I'm disappointed in MachFive2; I thought it would make BC easier. They seem to have avoided it entirely, though the rules do allow application of CC#2. I was getting a flute to work pretty well last night, however, until it crashed. Now I don't even know how I did it. Breath Control is a passion. You either become obsessed with getting sounds that work with it, or you drop it entirely. Being such a small niche in the market, we simply have no clout with the developers.

I'm still excited about Wallander Instruments, which is making their plugins BC compatible right "out of the box." BC seems to be the default, in fact. They're very good. I wish them well, because I NEED them to succeed!

Meanwhile, I'm still plugging away at MachFive2 and EXS24. Maybe someday I'll find the breakthrough.

Shooshie

[mhschmieder]

Last summer, I bought a used WX-7 on eBay, thinking I would be happier with its metal construction. Like Shooshie, I found that the WX-5 had way too much functionality that I would miss (including extra keys that I have gotten used to on my "real" saxophone), and after more time on the WX-7, learned enough to tweak my WX-5 setups to respond better to my playing. The WX-7 was resold a month later. I no longer consider my WX-5 a "cheap" toy .

[syntonica]

This is just an update and a short report: I went with the Akai EWI4000s because of the built-in tone module so I can park it in a corner and noodle around without too many wires. I truly like it. It is about the size of an overweight soprano sax, fingers like a recorder and the mouthpiece is like a plastic double-reed. It's a very confused piece of kit!

It is a lot easier to play than I thought it would be, despite having to dredge up all of my clarinet/sax experience from high school. You need a rather tight embouchure to play it and the airflow through is rather minimal, far less than any wind instrument I have played. (I suggest sitting while playing until you are used to it! ) The keys are rather nice--touch-sensitive rather than having to press down a pad. The octave rollers are strange, but are quite intuitive, once you have used them a bit. If you are looking for a quiet sax to practice on, this is definitely not it. While the fingerings are similar, there are several keys missing, comparatively. The unit is very expressive to play, once you get over how stiff the "reed" is and how much pressure you need to bend it enough to change the tone. The sound is not too bad, but the patches can be better. It comes with a lite version of the MidiQuest module to edit patches (with less crashiness than I have seen with the demo of the full version.) Mostly, however, I will be using it for MIDI input for composition.

Not to steer anyone away from the Yamaha controllers, which I have not tried, but I hope to add some information to help others who may be faced with a similar dilemma.

[Shooshie]

Would you answer one important question for me? (Well, maybe a couple)

Can you bend the pitch with the lip? In other words, can I do vibrato the same way I do it on the Soprano Sax? The original EWI had a thumb pad with which you were supposed to do vibrato. I didn't spend 20 years perfecting my lip-vibrato only to have to relearn it with the thumb. That has by far been my #1 reason for choosing the Yamaha WX series. The unfortunate thing about the WX-5's vibrato (and was the same for the WX-7 and WX-11) is that it's either up or down. That means you either start by biting upward or by lipping downward. You select which method you'll use in one of its DIP-switch preferences. Well, neither method works for me, though I can make it work simply because I have to. On soprano sax, I'm sort of well known for a series of exercises I created to enable me to play with my vibrato centered, so that it resembles a sine wave where the pitch runs right across the middle of the wave, rather than at the top or bottom of the wave as Yamaha expects us to do.

So, does the new EWI allow for lip vibrato, and... by chance... does it allow one to start the pitch in the middle and go both up AND down, returning to the middle as the resting point?


Another question: since I only want a controller, and not something that produces sounds, is it available without the tone module? And do you know if you can program it to send various continuous MIDI controllers?

I guess those questions might be answered on their website, but it's so much easier to ask someone who actually uses one than to dig through a marketing department's propaganda that rarely tells you exactly what you want to know. Thanks for the report, Syntonica!

Shoosh

[mhschmieder]

Good questions, Shooshie.

And I have one more to add: does sidewise pressure exert growl, as some have claimed?

This is different from normal up/down lip pressure.

Some claim the Akai is more expressive because it has two or three dimensions of unique parameters via embouchre.