Today, I was able to cross an item off the List of Things I Really Want to Do in My Life: I played an EWI for the very first time.
My buddy Jordan came back for the summer from New Orleans last night, and today his parents surprised him with a one-day-early birthday present of the wind-driven synthesizer coveted by Michael Brecker fans the world over. (I've posted before about the magnum-opus live treatment of Original Rays, the EWI feature from his first solo CD.) He brought it over this afternoon, and he and Aaron and I jammed on it for a good hour or so. It has sixty-something pre-programmed sounds, some of which have really weird names, and it's very much like a saxophone, except not. Some of the auxiliary keys are moved around, and the octaves are controlled by a series of rollers. It will obviously take quite a bit of programming to get something even half as elaborate as what Brecker has done, not to mention a lot of practice to get the special techniques down. Jordan was joking that maybe he could have Rays down by his senior recital, which will be three years from the semester that just ended. It'll be a great diversion for him between now and then, at any rate.
Oh, and needless to say, I want one of my own now...
Just look for the guys with the really big "wings": Thieves in Tennessee made off with a trailer containing nearly 3000 cases of Red Bull.
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My 7th grade band director owns an EWI. We were all obsessed with the pitch bender, and doing 134124 octave chromatic scales (without busting out laughing.. that was always tough). That was 2 years before I discovered the awesomeness of Michael Brecker. Back then we didn't have a clue. It's funny in retrospect.
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