Akai Professional EWI 5000 Wireless Electronic Wind Controller

I'll start with the cons. It was difficult to play. The mouthpiece felt like 98% resistance so it was like holding my breath. The keys do not move at all so it was hard to learn based on feel. You have to use your ears. The programmed sounds were not of the quality I'd expect for how expensive this item is. The multiple octave keys are great for range, but it's quite difficult to move across them without causing a blip in the sound. The pros. It's high quality and sturdy. Very receptive to dynamics and vibrato. Very customizable. I think if you're using this EWI to compose or do anything with midi, it's a very powerful tool if you're not able to learn piano. Personally, I was looking for something I could play in my apartment with headphones since my saxophone is just so loud. This just wasn't usable or fun enough to play as a hobby. I returned it immediately.

Amazing instrument with endless versatility. Well built, and an abundance of built-in features. I have not tried using any external software yet to add sounds to the bank, but there are 100 built-in instruments already. Some do not sound like the real instrument, but some are spot on, and I accept that it's just the nature of digital modeling. I will say that it is not intuitive and you need to seriously read through the instruction manual, and even then may need to refer to YouTube videos, but if you have the patience, you will love it once it is calibrated to your playing style. I find it most useful for practicing since I can throw on headphones and play without bothering anyone. I would've given it 4 stars, except GuitarCenter sent me a used one (which is kind of gross when you think about this being a wind instrument that goes in someone's mouth, so I had to bring it right back and have them ship me a new one. Other than that the product is great.

Good but quite complicate to use. Not easy to adjust to the touch sensitive keys.

Hard to figure out the controls in the instrument itself.

The EWI 5000 is incredible. I'm a sax player and set for sax fingering. It plays in the key of C, so sheet music on line and read without transposition. Or set for b fault, e flat The seven octave range is great. Now we have the range of guitar like a pink Floyd guitar solo. The octave rollers are the chalk. Very sensitive. Don't give,up just play scales. It can be mastered.

Pros: Rechargeable Battery, USB interface, Wireless audio, Stereo output Cons: No wireless MIDI, battery compartment too small to easily connect and disconnect battery, sample based sounds not useful in professional settings, analog synth replaced by sample synth, unit locks up when battery depleted and won't operate even when plugged in, significant delay when changing some patches Bottom Line: If you already own the EWI 4000s you may not want the EWI 5000. I had owned both the Yamaha WX11 and the AKAI EWI 4000s and found the Akai to be far superior. The sounds were reasonable but then I found PatchMan Music and got some really great sounds out of it. They are synth sounds but are expertly crafted to take full advantage of the wind controllers expressiveness. Before I was content to just play around at home, but with the new patches I actually started playing it out on gigs to very positive reviews. I also decided to midi it to a Yamaha Motif XS to layer it with really awesome sounds and again loaded patches from PatchMan which really took advantage of the EWI's strengths. It was the perfect combination. Sure, it was a little more gear to carry, but the sounds I could get were well worth it. So when I discovered there was a new Akai EWI I immediately put myself on the mailing list to be notified when it would be in stock. The preliminary improvements I read about seemed to take a great thing and make it better so I thought, why not? I got it and right away noticed it was the exact same mold used for the 4000s but the silver was replaced with black so it did look a little cooler. It weighed a little bit less and had a few things switched around but had the exact same feel as the 4000s, so no differences in playability. The plate covering the battery is secured with a screw and reveals a small compartment barely bigger than the battery itself. At the bottom of the compartment is a very small port to connect the battery. On the battery itself the cable is only a few inches so it's quite difficult to connect as it's hard to fit both your fingers and enough of the battery to get it connected. Once connected I plugged it into my mixer and powered it up. I went through the first couple of sounds (saxophones) and noticed there was a significant delay between when the patch was changed and when the unit was playable again. Not every patch, but enough to make me think changing patches while playing live might not be the best idea. (I've since heard from Akai tech support who report that the unit loads sounds into memory as you select them so the initial load can take some time but subsequent loads will be faster while the unit is powered on). Going through the patches I was amazed at the number of "saxophone" patches. Being a saxophonist myself, I've never heard a decent sampled sax that would be acceptable on a gig, so I was shocked at how bad these patches were and how many were there. They sounded more like kazoos than horns. I know it's a matter of taste, but the majority of the patches were completely unusable in professional situations except for the harmon trumpet and some of the organs. Everything else was poor imitations or real instruments or cheesy synth sounds you would be embarrassed to play on a gig. I hooked it up to my computer and loaded the editor and found very little in the way of configurable settings. The analog synth is completely gone in favor of the much less programmable sample synth. You can change the LFO's and a filter but you can't do much with the wave apart from select it. It just seemed very limited compared with the previous unit's capabilities. So I killed the audio and midi'ed it up to my Motif XS with the PatchMan patches and it performed just as brilliantly as my 4000s. But there is one annoying little side effect. When you switch the unit on it automatically send a program change so whatever synth is midi'ed changes patches whenever you power the EWI on. Who would want that? This leads me to ask the question "why did I buy this thing?" All the onboard sounds are unusable so the wireless option is a moot point, and the only improvement is a rechargeable battery which is hard to replace and (by the way) will render the unit unplayable if it ever goes bad. I can't really say I'm happy with my purchase, so much so that I'm probably going to be returning it. It's just not a real improvement on the 4000s and I think they could have improved certain areas rather than what they chose to change. Here's the wish list of what I would like to have been in the 5000: Compartment and cartridge for rechargeable battery. The battery cartridge would lock into place and possibly have an external charger so you could have multiple batteries ready. Should also have a cartridge which could be populated with AA batteries so you could replace them in a pinch. Wireless MIDI. Most of the EWI performers I've seen layer the EWI with other synths on live gigs. Wireless MIDI is sorely needed for these applications. Relocation of the display LED. It would be nice to be able to change patches without having to move the EWI around. Locating it somewhere in eyesight of the performer without having to shift would really help in live situations where you want to quickly change patches. USB Connector. The addition of the USB port was a good idea and is extremely useful when connecting to a DAW. Stereo audio out. The addition of stereo was a good idea. The unit should be able to operate on AC alone even if no battery is connected. NEVER GET RID OF THE ANALOG SYNTH!!! For me the EWI is the perfect platform for analog synthesis. The EWI, more than any keyboard, can more fully exploit the sonic capabilities of analog programming than any other type of controller.