I’m curious about this one, how is it in terms of expressiveness compared to Respiro ? And how about sound design ? The demos you can hear on youtube are too cheesy for me.
This is one of the key reasons i will certainly upgrade to either 20 or 30 at some point. It would be great to be able to store and play an endless amount of Zencore, Zenology, RC patches from the horn alone or with another midi controller/iOS midi app. Offers more super efficient/cool/mobile rig set up optionss. I am also a heavy Roland User so having the ability to design patches myself from samples, models, waves, voices, layering, etc in environments I’m very familiar with is irresistible.
In the meantime, Respiro is really amazing. It’s just been several hours but it’s brilliant. It’s been a very long time since i stayed up 48 hours straight playing. The super light AE-GO x Respiro wirelessly via iPhone 14pro is simply magical. I really don’t need anything else. Respiro is so very organic and enchanting. i can see myself quickly getting addicted to creating tons of unique instruments.
Respiro continues to impress but id like to mention Qithesizer and Mela 4 for iPad/iOS if they haven’t been mentioned here.
At any rate, Qithesizer is a no brainer for any EWI owner at 12.99. It’s very deep and if you have Respiro, you can steal some macros to help you if you’re not great at sound design. If you are great at sound design or want to learn—-look no further than this app. It offers you access to much of what I imagine is under the hood in Respiro.
Beware, there is no English manual for the software yet but the dev says it’s on the way.
Finally, I highly recommend using Anker Soundcore wireless earbuds. Any wireless gaming headphones will work but the Soundcore has a few great features that make it perfect for AE users.
These buds come with a cool dongle that even allows pass thru charging to your iPad. Anyways, they use 2.4 ghz wireless to accomplish the undetectable latency (>30ms) but also offer simultaneous Bluetooth 5.2 connection so you can still answer your phone while playing. It’ll prioritize the call but you can still play.
Also, you can connect unlimitable dongles which are available for $15 on Amazon. So, wire up your MacBook, iPad and gaming rig and switch easily via the iOS app.
I got these. Honestly, they’re not going to blow anyone away sonically but they’re cheap and offer some really great features for this specific use case that I haven’t found. They sound good but not great. $75-100 headphone quality range which is great for $55.
I would love to find some Hi Fi wireless cans that receive 2.4 or 5 ghz but I don’t see anything. Apple hinted that the next AirPod Pros transmit high quality audio without latency but we’ll see.
In the meantime this was the best I could find with the earbud form factor. Sony PS5 Pulse with 3D audio sound much better but they’re over the ear and don’t have good battery life. Also, other brands don’t connect with multiple devices and dongles simultaneously which is killer for EWI players.
I didn’t know—and am very disappointed that Aerophones apparently cannot connect to Macs via Bluetooth like they can connect to iPads and iPhones. Like…WTF. It’s detectable but never connects. I looked it up and Roland confirms it must be connected via USB.smh
Highly pissed about that. I’ll get over it but it’s dumb.
I have windows and the native bluetooth implementation is terrible so I don’t do that with the onboard bluetooth. Windows has an easier time installing the proprietary driver though.
I believe Macs work fine (as others in the facebook groups have mentioned using them) you just have to be careful to not be paired already to a nearby device, usually your tablet or phone. In bluetooth first device to pair wins.
So I broke down and ordered an AE-20W. Wish they had an all black model but all white is smooth too.
Truth is, the GO model was sufficient.lol. GAS got me when I saw the new colorway and bundle deal from Costco. It’s amost a full $100 cheaper than retail and comes with Roland over the ear headphones, Roland stand, Roland shoulder harness (no lame neck strap) and free Roland Cloud Pro membership along with all of the things AE normally comes with (bag, moisture catch, etc).
I agree. Typically that’s the case as it relates to wind instruments for sure. I purchased my EWI and many sounds for it from there years ago. Also, as I’m sure you know but many may not—Matt was/is greatly involved in Roland’s AE project and still makes many of the Zencore sounds for it available on Roland Cloud.
I would still recommend everyone interested in a wind instrument to purchase from Patchman if in US—especially if you’re a beginning player or unfamiliar with wind synths. They set it up for you and also throw in some sounds.
However, in this case, for a limited time only Costco’s bundle is definitely the best value I’ve seen worldwide unless one just doesnt like the all white finish.
This is me accompanying myself on the Aerophone Pro with a Novation Circuit Tracks to sequence some of the channels. Albeit with a very crude accompaniment and not a whole of thought just noodling around while testing out.
This demo configuration is using Local On (MIDI control switch on the side to off) and I set MIDI RX to off for everything in Parts 2-4 so my part 1 would be handled by my breath and Parts 2-4 would be handled by the Circuit Tracks. This kind of works for sounds where the breath controller CCs acts as a gate on all the output so with that 0 nothing sounds (the drone Bassoon in part 4 does this).
The problem is there’s no MIDI RX at the part level for velocity so it still triggers note in the other parts which for Part 2 Bass and Part 3 Sitar layers it into the sound because they are primarily velocity dependent. Additionally that extra note triggering will override instruments which are set to Mono (the default for the Bassoon tone) so they stop sounding while you are playing (which may be what you want, haven’t explored how well it works when something else retrigs in the window) so you’d need to set Poly to keep the drone going.
This is fixable by setting Local Off (MIDI control switch on the side to on and setting MIDI Ctrl Sound to Off in the menu) the only problem is you’ll have to merge the streams at some point and get it back into the input on the Aerophone. I wasn’t about to try setting up the wiring for now, this worked as a proof of concept and I’ll factor that in when I rejig my routing at some point in the future.
Additionally I found you can’t use the drum kits on the Aerophone at the same time as synths but usually that isn’t much of a problem as most of the sequencers will have plenty of drum kits and audio inputs/outputs to merge things together (I haven’t tried though so I’m not sure how easy it is on the Tracks).
Overall this seems to work well and I can combine this sort of strategy with the on the fly MIDI handling I’ve implemented in the Electra One. I’ve also ordered a much more advanced sequencer (Synthstrom Deluge) because I like the Tracks grid setup approach but there’s lots of stuff that still needs a screen to know specifics.
This is very helpful. I’ll be using AE-20 with other Roland gear like MC707, MV-1 and/or SP404. They all have similar implementation so getting them optimally configured shouldn’t be too painful but a bit of trial and error…
I wonder if Aerophone can control the Zencore tones on the MV and MC. Both came with a ton of sounds. Both also have TR style sequencer with motion, tons of great effects and scene based workflow which should make creating grooves and environments really quick and deep.
By default you will be able to control anything not natively setup for a wind controller using tonguing for velocity. That always works even for keyboard designed patches on synths or plugins.
Roland though tends to have CC11 for expression set to control patch volume by default in a lot of their stuff (the Virus Ti2 does as well) so if you send that you may get rudimentary breath control. CC2 and CC11 are both sent by default.
That’s rudimentary because making a wind synth patch usually requires a volume component and a timbre component where the timbre changes as you breath harder. This is why just controlling the LPF cutoff is used so often as it does both at the same time.
If you do use the expression CC with keyboard designed patch, you’ll want to set velocity to fixed to get consistent results not based on tonguing.