Akai Professional EWI USB Electronic Wind Controller  

As a former sax player , now playing bass/guitar, I thought it would be fun to have a variety of woodwind instruments to play without having to buy them all.  The EWI USB seemed just the thing.

It was fairly easy to learn to finger (using the sax fingering setting), and was fun to play.  The octave rollers took some getting used to.  The pitch bend plates were less than adequate - not similar enough to the embouchure method for bending pitch.

There are plenty of instruments and variations to play with.  Imagine playing a violin or a doublebass using sax fingerings!

Even after playing with it for several months, I could never get the tonguing to work rapidly enough to consider performing with it. Now, it is having some kind of problem converting the fingerings to the correct pitches - it will only produce 4 pitches, each a half-step apart, and the octave keys work backwards (high produces low and vice-versa).

Evidently this thing has fried itself just sitting on my shelf for couple of weeks.  Not a happy ending to this experiment.

Obviously, having a moderately expensive instrument fail after only a few months of use is disappointing.  Had it continued to work, I could have rated the value as a 6 or 7.

Pros: Fun to play with, lots of instrument sounds, good idea, stationary (theoretically more durable) keys and less expensive than the Yamaha

Cons: Octave rollers difficult to manage, pitch bend not intuitive to use, hard to hold the instrument without inadvertantly touching trill keys or the pitch bend plates, and (in my case, at least) early failure.