AKAI Professional EWI Solo

The new EWI solo is close to being the best EWI and also therefore the best wind synth on the market in many respects. It has a good on-board battery, the OLED display/navigation features are great, the new F#-key is a great addition. The on board speaker makes it possible to take out the EWI and practice without any complicated setup. It just works. The instrument is a joy to both practice and perform on. I take it out many times a day, and it's probably the best addition I've had to my music setup in years.

I've always been of the opinion that wind synths sound much better as synthesizers than an imitation of wind instruments. The EWI solo has about 200 on-board sounds, and around half of them are sampled real-life instruments. They sound fairly good as far as that kind of instrument goes, but I'd never use them for anything but novelty purposes. That goes doubly for things like guitar/xylophone/piano/steel drum patches and similar, which to me make little sense at all. Several of the actual synth sounds, on the other hand, are decent, although they probably don't live up to the EWI 4000S overall, especially not with Patchman's sound bank.