Matt Marantz EWI softsynth gig-rig video with Dune 2, UVI Falcon, Reaktor, and Dexed 

Thanks Fsaxwas9! Cheers. Well, if the computer broke somehow, I guess I'd just use some hardware I still have if I was really in a pinch. I have tested the heck out of this software setup though, and I probably failed to mention this in the video (didn't want to make it sound too complicated), but I had to go pretty deep with all the OS settings in Windows to get everything to work as desired. There was even a lot of tweaking directly in Cubase to get the optimal performance. I probably should've mentioned some of these things in the video, but anyway I turned off a lot of background services in Windows 10, updates are set never to occur during hours you might be playing a gig, the CPU is overclocked to 5.0ghz in BIOS, the hyperthreading on the i7 is turned "off" in BIOS (believe it or not, this actually improves polyphonic performance with audio software), the OS is set to keep the CPU running at "high performance" status which basically means it rests and stays at 5.0ghz instead of keeping it running slower and then boosting when needed (improves audio performance), the CPU is set never to go into "sleep mode", and a bunch of other stuff... I tried to turn off Cortana but no luck so far. Every time I install a new piece of software, which is rare, I test all the audio stuff to make sure it's still working. I uninstalled Norton Anti Virus because Windows Defender has anti-virus and Norton would sometimes delete audio-related files & it also took up CPU power. I can't even remember everything I did anymore, but Focusrite has a great article online explaining some of the stuff you can do to optimize Windows for audio. My Mac actually crashes more often than my PC, imagine that! In the event of a crash, which so far hasn't happened with this particular setup combination, I suppose you'd simply have to switch to saxophone the rest of the song and then restart the software during someone else's solo or something! On my laptop, I forgot to plug the power cord in. The batteries ran out right after I finished a solo on a tune! I had to restart it during the piano solo, haha. Learned my lesson that time, always check the power cord. I test the heck out of it whenever I make any changes before a gig situation, and Cubase 9.5 has been incredibly stable so far. Reaper crashed a lot with Soundtoys plugins which is why I dropped it and switched to Cubase. All computers will crash every once in a while, but this system is very stable. My laptop is also very stable. I think Windows 10 has totally caught up to Mac OS with audio, and the price to performance ratio is not even close (lot more for your money with PC's.) You just have to be willing to tweak a lot of things. Mac OS is a lot more plug & play, but with Windows you get more power and more control over everything. It feels a little more open source than Mac, at this point. Plus, as much as I love Logic, there's just some things that require .vst's. So I'd be on 3rd party software even if I was primarily on Mac at this point. Logic's "Chord triggerer" plugin doesn't work with all synths like Cubase's does, and you can't use MIDIChords in Logic because it's a .vst. I digress....

You have to turn on the sensitivity to the breath control on the settings page of Dexed. Strangely, breath midi cc#2 is labeled as “Foot” on the Dexed settings page. Make sure that is on, and then from there it’s just regular FM synthesis, however, if you are not already familiar with it then explaining FM synthesis is beyond the scope of what I am able to offer for free on youtube comments. If you fancy taking a bonafide wind synth lesson with me, please get in touch via www.mattmarantz.com using the contact form.

@@mattmarantz4863 thanks for getting back to me so fast - I appreciate it. I've spent some hours playing around with those settings - and nothing seems to work - the pitch information is sent just fine - but the volume/breath level seems to be ignored. I'll give it another go - but if I can't make it work, I'll have to try and get fluidsynth on everything and just work with soundfonts, which work out of the box on Android. Thanks for the offer of lessons - but I've been playing flutes and whistles on-and-off for 4 decades now - and I'm just thinking of returning to them as my fretting hand is slowing and twitching nowdays; the curse of age....

Ok, that’s fine, but playing flute for 4 decades has nothing to do with knowing how to use synthesis well or your original & very specific question about how to use wind synths successfully with Dexed. EWI is its own unique instrument and deep knowledge of synthesis and the way midi controllers work with computers is complex and can be frustrating at times. It could be as simple as a situation where your windsynth isn’t actually transmitting any MIDI data to your computer. I can help you with all of it if you take some lessons with me. The video posted here is meant only to be a quick overview of something that I get a lot of general questions about; My EWI software rig, which took me years of my own time to figure out and implement in a reliable way. So if you want some relief from your frustrations, contact me via www.mattmarantz.com and I’ll get back to you with rates and availability.

Steinberg includes a few synths with the Cubase DAW. I tried them and they seem to be pretty low quality compared to all the other stuff I like to use. If you are looking for a DAW with better included synths & FX, check out Logic X! It's great and ES2 & Retrosynth are fantastic for EWI. I am really just using Cubase as a host for all my .vst instruments and FX, and I also like the flexibility of Cubase for MIDI processing. I can do a lot of cool MIDI input scaling to control the sensitivity of certain synthesizers' filters or other envelopes which don't contain scaling options of their own using Cubase MIDI Input Transformer, which is very helpful. All that being said, yes I love NI Komplete and I use Reaktor (especially some user blocks and user created synths which are uploaded on the community forum), Kontakt, FM8, and some other NI stuff as well as Dune 2, Dexed, Falcon, and Omnisphere all the time. I can pretty much get whatever I need out of those synths, and then I use a variety of FX plugins from companies like TAL, Relab, Soundtoys, and other various companies...

In case Matt doesn't check in on this thread, and having just watched this video myself, I'd hazard that the answer is: Kontakt is purely sample based, though it does have a host of features, including envelopes and filters. All the sounds/patches demonstrated here are virtual synths, rather than ROMpler type sounds. I'm not sure how Kontakt is on things like, for instance, portamento, nor does it have things like unison mode (multiple instances of an oscillator, each slightly detuned); and I'm sure its filter are fine, but ... hardly hardly the stuff of legend. If one is looking for synth sounds, with maximum options for expression, then one would tend to look at the kind of synths shown here, rather than a particular Kontakt library. (That said, Omnisphere is also sample based. But it also tends to feature highly on keyboard/composer/producer Top 10 virtual synth lists, whereas the synths available for Kontakt aren't all that - and the fact that devs don't release "synth" modules for Kontakt also tells a story.)

Hi Manny ~ Thanks for your interest! I do like Kontakt a lot for certain things, but for my EWI I find that there are problems. I do use it sometimes, especially for hosting keyboard libraries when I compose. However, the issue for EWI is that the velocity sensitivty is stepped. If you look inside a Kontakt instrument under the "hood" in the settings section, there are varying degrees of stepped velocity in different Kontakt instruments and there does not appear to be a way to completely remove velocity control from it. So what happens is on EWI, velocity is triggered a little bit "late". There's not enough time for the EWI to send your ideal velocity rate via MIDI on the first articulated note between the time when it first senses your breath input and the time where you've ramped up to your ideal velocity. So I tend to get lost notes or at least undesired velocity response (usually too low velocity input) from Kontakt on certain notes, often the first notes of a phrase. Also as mentioned by Owen, I also tend to prefer real synthesis as opposed to sample based synthesis, and that's a nother reason I don't favor Kontakt for EWI. That being said, I do enjoy Omnisphere 2.5 very much which is sample based, especially because it has smooth velocity response and not stepped velocity. You can also turn off velocity completely on Omnisphere which I often do when I'm making an EWI patch. You don't really need velocity for EWI patches. There are plenty of other ways to introduce expression into the mix when you're patching EWI sounds.

@@mattmarantz4863 what the heck are you talking about when you say “stepped velocity”? Velocity is a one time event for each note.

@@alphabeets Sorry for the delay I don't check these threads very often. I am not talking about sending velocity, I'm talking about Kontakt. Have you ever looked inside of a Kontakt instrument and noticed how they use many different samples which are stepped samples from low to maximum amplitude for each note which are triggered based on velocity input? The higher quality the instrument, usually the more velocity steps they've sampled. Steps, amounts, levels, whatever you want to call them, they go from soft to loud. The problem with EWI is that, as you say, yes, velocity is a one time message sent per-note but on EWI since it is breath controlled it takes a little bit of time for your breath to ramp up from zero to your intended velocity input for each note. By a little bit of time, I mean some milliseconds. So unfortunately that means that Kontakt usually gets the velocity information sent too soon, and then your notes have weird steppy choppy volume levels especially on the first note of a phrase or on emphasized articulations within your played lines. There is a way on the EWI to tell the breath sensor to delay a certain amount of time, I think 20-30 milliseconds, but even that is usually not enough time for me. So I just turn off velocity sensitivity for the amp envelopes on my synths. The problem with Kontakt is that the whole amplitude thing is stepped, so if you turn off velocity sensitivity it sounds crappy... Omnisphere, on the other hand, is also a sampler synth but doesn't work the same way. It is smooth as butter with EWI. I've tried and tried to get Kontakt to be comfortable for me. I can't. It's just not my bag... I like the other NI stuff better like Reaktor. Reaktor is probably the closest to the behavior of the best old analog synths in terms of raw tone and quality of response out of all of them. I don't know how to build synths from scratch in it, but I can cobble together bits of other people's work and make patches for myself which are among my favorite of all .vst's in the box. Love it. Cheers. Matt