SWAM Flute + EWI on Ravel Habanera

Описание: Audio Modeling SWAM Flute controlled by an Akai EWI 5000 wind controller and an expression pedal on Maurice Ravel’s Pièce en Forme de Habanera…

For my starting point, the default wind controller settings sounded nice out of the box. But for this Ravel piece, I wanted to explore how to get the most expressiveness out of the virtual instrument. In particular, I wanted: the ability to change tone color independently from volume; a breathy “impressionistic” classical sound; a rich vibrato with lots of tone color variation; subtle variation in vibrato depth and speed; and subtle overblowing on a note or two.

As I’ll describe below, I made a number of changes in MIDI mappings and scripted some behaviors with the Logic Pro X scripter for coordinating some MIDI continuous controllers. But as it turns out, the most important change I made wasn’t in the settings, but in my playing. I worked on creating more movement in vibrato and breath, and especially learning how to play very softly in parts.

For vibrato, I tried diaphragm vibrato, but I’m just not very good at it, and this piece really exposed that. I tried saxophone-style bite vibrato, but despite being a sax player, I struggle with controlling it on the EWI. So I went back to the approach I used for my SWAM cello video (   • SWAM Cello + EWI on Piazzolla Tango Etude ...  ), where the vibrato depth and rate are controlled by a weighted combination of expression pedal, breath, and the note value. Here the vibrato depth is mostly from the expression pedal with some contribution from breath, and vibrato rate is mostly breath with some contribution from pedal depth and the note value. I also mapped a special “fast vibrato” mode to the EWI hold button (top right index finger) which I used on just a few notes.

Other settings for tone color:
"formant" - I mapped the formant control to the EWI pitch-up (right thumb up) and turned the actual pitch-up range to a tiny amount. The formant gives a nice way to change tone color without changing volume and I use it mostly on trills and low notes. To avoid fat-fingering jumps in the formant value, I scripted a “slew” to smooth out the value.
"classical" - initially I moved the “classical/jazz/ethnic” slider all the way left to “classical” but later found richer tone color and variety moving it to the mid-range of classical
"breath noise" - for a more “impressionistic” flute sound, I use the maximum amount of breath noise at low to medium breath, but taper it off for higher breath to avoid noisy artifacts.
"overblow" - on a couple of notes I wanted a subtle overblow sound (such as the "portando" transition at 2:32). I mapped the EWI interval button (bottom right index finger button) to “overblow” and a tiny amount of “growl”
"pipe split" - the “auto” pipe split for controlling the register breaks works great in general and does exactly the right thing on the chromatic passages. But there are a few places where I wanted a breathier sound in a particular register, so I scripted a key switch with some low notes on the EWI to control the pipe split.

Scripter source code is on GitHub if you’re curious (https://github.com/marcozarco/logic-p...) but it’s pretty specific to my needs with the SWAM flute.

The piano sound is from The Grandeur by Native Instruments, controlled by an M-Audio Hammer 88 keyboard controller.

Effects:
SoftTube Tape (type B) is used for some analog saturation.
Valhalla Room is used for reverb

Check out my channel for more videos by Marco Zagha (err, Marco Zarco) and a bunch of wind controller playlists.

Flute image in the thumbnail adapted from a photo by Lloyd Lee (https://flickr.com/photos/lloydnslee/) used under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)