Ha Ha. Yes, I have just bought (rather foolishly) an EWI, thinking that I
could easily use it to make MIDI recordings instead of using the keyboard
as the MIDI input. I am not so skilled on the keyboard. So I thought if I
get a wind controller, I can close the lid on my piano keyboard and instead
pick up the wind controller and play that, after all I can play much better
and faster on the flute than on the piano. I thought what fun, I can use
the EWI to play all the different midi instrument sounds available.

It was only after I got the EWI I discovered how fundamentally different
wind instruments are from percussive instruments like the piano. When you
press a note on the keyboard it sends a MIDI note on, with the velocity
controlling how loud you play the instrument. However playing a note on the
EWI it always sends a midi note on with a velocity just above zero. This is
because when you start blowing the sound level starts from zero then builds
up. A wind controller and all wind instruments (non percussive instruments)
do not have a ADSR envelope but instead use the MIDI breath controller for
the attack and sustain levels in real time. For that reason trying to use a
wind controller to play instruments like the piano or guitar won't really
work out.

I did look at some sound fonts in particular the  Fluid (R3) General MIDI
SoundFont (GM) but this is a large sound fount and has the vibrato built
into the sound loops. However smaller samples like "TimGM6mb.sf2" use have
tiny loops without vibrato and use the sound generator engine to provide
the vibrato. What is needed is a custom sound font that uses a breath
controller to control the volume. There is natural vibrato in the MIDI
breath data.

So what would be great if we could somehow add a magic flag to fluidsynth
that overrides the global vibrato modulation used on many sound fonts and
instead control that with the breath controller input. This would save
having to manually edit all the sound fonts to respond to the breath
controller.

I will post over the weekend a MIDI recording (with matching audio) of me
playing using the EWI and we will see what anybody can do with the MIDI
data when fed into fluid synth.

Louis


On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 5:54 PM, CERESA Jean-Jacques ENAC/ENAC <
jean-jacques.cer...@enac.fr> wrote:

>  Hi,
>
> In the aim for adding monophonic support to Fluidsynth, i am interested by
> EWI behavior. I am not an EWI player nor an accoustic monophonic
> instrument player.
> I am only familiar with somes polyphonic instruments.
>
> I wonder how an EWI reacts when a player is playing in staccato or legato
> manner.
> In others words, what could be the stream of MIDI messages produced by an
> EWI
> when playing in all possible combinations of articulations ?
>
> Thoses MIDI informations seems to be useful to be compared with MIDI
> messages
> produced by a MIDI keyboard controler when playing it in the same manner
> (staccato,legato,..)
> than playing EWI.
>
> Any knowledge are welcome.
> Thanks to monophic instruments players for your interest.
>
> jjc
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fluid-dev mailing list
> fluid-dev@nongnu.org
> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-dev
>
>
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