AKAI Professional EWI Solo

The new EWI solo is close to being the best EWI and also therefore the best wind synth on the market in many respects. It has a good on-board battery, the OLED display/navigation features are great, the new F#-key is a great addition. The on board speaker makes it possible to take out the EWI and practice without any complicated setup. It just works. The instrument is a joy to both practice and perform on. I take it out many times a day, and it's probably the best addition I've had to my music setup in years.

I've always been of the opinion that wind synths sound much better as synthesizers than an imitation of wind instruments. The EWI solo has about 200 on-board sounds, and around half of them are sampled real-life instruments. They sound fairly good as far as that kind of instrument goes, but I'd never use them for anything but novelty purposes. That goes doubly for things like guitar/xylophone/piano/steel drum patches and similar, which to me make little sense at all. Several of the actual synth sounds, on the other hand, are decent, although they probably don't live up to the EWI 4000S overall, especially not with Patchman's sound bank.

One really can't desire more for the price. I played on It for a good year now and I Just recently switched to an Aerophone AE-20 fromm Roland, mainly because (and this Is my opinion as Professional musician) I found the responsiveness of the EWI somewhat underwhelming. You can't expect to double tongue or make fast and huge dynamic changes here, but this definitely won't be a problem for beginners or people who aren't at a pro level with their own instrument already.

For just having fun with digital sounds and playing without getting phisically tired, the EWI absolutely does it's job right. It's awfully easy to set up, the tones are good enough (the "real" instrument sounds like flute, sax, oboe... all sound pretty bad if you are used to the real counterparts, but the synth sounds are overall nice to hear and play with) and the fingerings leave room for playing scales on different ways, so that everyone can get used to it pretty easily. The touch sensors can be confusing at first, but you can adjust the responsiveness in order to more easily play the notes clean.

Lastly, the EWI is NOT a practice instrument for saxophonists. Those searching for a digital sax to practice with their Headphones should probably look at the Yamaha YDS-150. It's also not perfect, but anything else just won't really cut it.

For Studio productions with external VSTs, go look at the EWI USB, that's the one for you!