If I’m fingering D I can lift up my middle finger and ring finger on my right hand to raise the pitch a minor third to F… Or… I can raise the index finger on my left hand to do the same. The other breakthrough moment I found was realising that each key in the EWI system actually has a more profound use – it raises or alters the pitch of the note by a certain number of semitones.
To stress the point… There is nothing inherently logical about those fingering systems unless you consider their role in releasing and altering the partials within a wave… But the EWI doesn’t need that. replicates a fingering system which slowly evolved over time to deal with the way that sound is produced and pitch controlled in a tube… But the EWI is not a tube.
The post above misses a crucial point (or at least didn’t make it entirely clear) which is that the EWI system opens up amazing possibilities. The only fingerings worth using are the EWI fingerings. I totally had to create a login just to add my bit to this thread. At the same time it limits those newbies to an inferior fingering system. It makes people believe that the EWI is easier to learn for newbies as it actually is. The reason why Akai had added those fingerings is quite clearly a marketing strategy. This clearly contradicts the idea of instantly using familiar fingerings. No third octave fingerings for any instrument. There are two good reasons for this:ġ) The EWI fingerings are the fingerings that were originally designed for the instrument.Ģ) There are too many essential keys missing on the sax, flute and oboe fingerings for actually using these fingerings without having to relearn lots of technical passages and thus getting further confused by having a new version that won’t work on the original instrument anymore. I would strongly recommend to use the EWI fingerings no matter what instrument you are coming from. Since the Bb bis key is only active in certain combinations this number is reduced to something between 2,048 – 3,000 possible fingering combinations.) (Theoretically there are 4096 possible combinations. The most alternative fingerings are definitely offered by the original EWI fingerings. I would say saxophone mode, because it makes more sense to me (cause I obviously play saxophone) and also that having more alternatives is NEVER a bad thing. If you are coming from an instrument that isn’t offered as a fingering on the EWI 4000, what mode should you use? That is a tough call. The FOUR differences I noted was that the saxophone fingerings offered 4 alternatives that are absent in the EWI Mode fingerings. The second thing I noticed when I printed off the two fingering charts (yes, I had to print them off and cross out the fingerings that were the same) was the the EWI fingerings were basically the same exact fingerings as the saxophone mode fingerings. I think the meant to color in the next key, K5 for G#.
Akai ewi usb finger chart manual#
First, the revision D manual I think has a misprint on the EWI Fingerings. The EWI 4000 does offer an EWI Fingerings Mode, which looks pretty much identical to the saxophone fingering mode with a couple of differences. But what about if you play something else, or perhaps you play nothing at all. So, obviously, if you play flute, switch the EWI into Flute Fingerings mode. I suppose if you are coming from another instrument, say Oboe, flute, clarinet, saxophone, or trumpet, switching the EWI into a mode that emulates the fingerings from the instrument you are coming from makes the most sense.
If you too forgot, refresh yourself here (reference manual). Someone asked me about this recently, and I honestly totally forgot that the Akai EWI 4000S has different fingering modes.