EMEAPP’S COLLECTION INCLUDES SOME RARE AND INTERESTING EARLY ELECTRONIC WIND INSTRUMENTS.
Read on for a guided tour…..or skip to the end for an interview with composer and electric wind instrument player Stuart Diamond as well as a two-part concert video by Stuart’s duo with Don Slepian, Electric Diamond.
Back in April of 2023, EMEAPP hosted a performance by Electric Diamond, a duo that consists of Don Slepian on keyboards and Stuart Diamond on the Berglund Instruments NuRAD. Seeing Stuart’s super-cool wind controller in action inspired us to do a deep dive into the Electronic Wind Instruments in our collection. Read on to learn more about the history of electronic wind instruments and the specific instruments in our collection, and then stay tuned for a video interview we did with Stuart about his EWI and electronic wind instruments in general. Finally, you can catch the full Electric Diamond performance at the end!
WHAT IS AN ELECTRONIC WIND INSTRUMENT?
For the purposes of this article, we are defining “electronic wind instrument” as any electronic device that is designed to make the world of electronic music accessible to wind instrument players. This includes effects units that cater to wind players as well as actual breath-activated synthesizers and controllers. Some electronic wind instruments are simply controllers, meaning that they are played like a wind instrument but need to be hooked up to an external synthesizer or other device that actually generates the sound waves. Others are complete instruments with included onboard sounds and synthesis. And some can serve both purposes – they have their own onboard sounds, but can also be hooked to an external synthesizer and used as a controller. EMEAPP’s collection includes a variety of early electronic wind instruments of all types: read on to learn more about them all!
HISTORY
Today’s electronic wind instruments can trace their roots back to two early models, Computone’s Lyricon and Steiner-Parker’s EVI. These models were independently developed on opposite coasts in about the same timeframe, from the early 70s through the early 80s. While both instruments originated the same way (imagine stereotypical electronics nerds tinkering away in their basements), their development paths diverged quickly. The Lyricon remained an analog instrument and ultimately faded into obscurity while the EVI embraced MIDI/digital technology as well as alternate instrument fingerings and evolved into a modern version that is still for sale today. The story of the development and evolution of these two instruments offers an interesting look at the obstacles faced and the decisions made by the earliest pioneers of electronic synthesis.
Computone Instruments: Lyricon, Wind Synthesizer Driver, Lyricon II
In the early 1970s, Bill Bernardi, an electrical engineer and ex-military-band-musician, began designing the Lyricon with assistance from Roger Noble and Shadowfax musician Chuck Greenberg. Eventually Bernardi and Noble founded Computone, Inc in Bernardi’s Massachusetts basement using a loan backed by Bernardi’s life insurance policy. They filed the patent for the Lyricon on October 5, 1971 but the first Lyricon was not actually completed until 1974. It was immediately sold to jazz musician Tom Scott who used it on his Tom Cat album that year. Handcrafting a Lyricon was a painstaking process and it took Bernardi and Noble another year to manufacture six more of them, which were quickly purchased and used by musicians including Wayne Shorter, Bennie Maupin, and David Sanborn.
The Lyricon has been described somewhat unflatteringly as “a metal clarinet plugged into a short-wave radio” but it could produce an exciting palette of futuristic horn sounds that intrigued musicians of the time. Using a form of additive synthesis, the player could change between types of overtones with a key switchable between fundamentals of G, B, C, E, and F, allowing the player to easily transpose parts written for saxophones, trumpets, etc. It had an octave range that could be switched between low, medium, or high as well as controls for glissando, portamento, and a chorus-type effect that Bernardi labeled “timbre attack.” The Lyricon used a bass clarinet mouthpiece with a sprung metal sensor on a non-vibrating reed to detect lip pressure, allowing for pitch bend and vibrato control. Like an acoustic wind instrument, dynamics were controlled via the force of the player’s breath. The Lyricon sensed air pressure using a transducer that, according to Bernardi, was the most complicated part of the instrument. It consisted of a membrane that moved with the air, changing the light output from an LED, which was in turn sensed by a photocell and converted to voltage that controlled the volume. Because the player’s lip and air pressure were converted into continuous voltages, the Lyricon was an incredibly responsive and fluid instrument and, according to many of its fans, it remains the wind controller that best reproduces the real-life expressiveness of an acoustic wind instrument.
The original Lyricon ultimately sold less than 200 units mainly due to its complex manufacturing process and extravagant price ($3295, which equals about $10,000 in today’s dollars). Furthermore, the Lyricon 1 was not compatible with other analog synths of the time: when designing the Lyricon, Bernardi modeled the control voltages after the overtone series, meaning it used an exponential increase of voltages for each octave instead of the linear approach of one-volt-per-octave adopted by Moog, ARP, and Oberheim. Bernardi received so many requests to make the Lyricon compatible with standard analog synths that he created the Wind Synthesizer Driver, which did not have any onboard sounds of its own and could only be used as a controller for an external synth.
The Wind Synthesizer Driver was a control voltage generator which could be hooked up to any one volt-per-octave synth with up to nine ¼” jack cords. The principle of the Driver is very similar to modern MIDI-based wind controllers in that lip, wind and key controls could be assigned to different synthesizer parameters and controlled from the horn.
Later, at the request of Lyricon users who wanted to play thirds, fifths, and octaves the way multi-oscillator analog synths could, Bernardi also developed the Lyricon II which featured two internal oscillators and was thus capable of generating two notes at a time.
Around this time, Computone partnered with music instrument manufacturer Selmer, who provided some much-needed capital and helped to mass-produce thousands of units combined of the Lyricon II and Wind Synthesizer Driver. But even with Selmer’s clout behind them, Computone’s instruments never really caught on with the general public and the company ultimately went out of business in the early 80s. Even so, the Lyricon’s original customer, Tom Scott, continued to use it in his work as a studio musician for Steely Dan and the Grateful Dead. Scott even used it on Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” – the trumpet-esque motifs sprinkled throughout the song are actually the Lyricon in action – see here:
But despite a few dedicated users like Scott, the Lyricon became a casualty of the growing interest in a newfangled technology known as MIDI and in digital wind instruments that could support it such as the Yamaha WX7.
Steiner-Parker Instruments: EVI, EWI
Interestingly, during the years that Bernardi was struggling to get his designs to market, a rival to the Lyricon was being developed simultaneously on the opposite side of the US. In the early 1970s, Nyle Steiner, a classically trained trumpet player who enjoyed tinkering with electronics, began building instrument prototypes in his basement with his friend Dick Parker. They divided the work: Steiner designed the circuitry while Parker preferred to focus on the woodworking for the cases. Steiner originally set out to create an electronic instrument that could be played with trumpet fingering, since he fully admitted he “could not play keyboard very well.” He initially focused on building an electronic string instrument that used three trumpet-like valves to lengthen or shorten the strings. Unfortunately, the mechanics of using actual strings turned out to be difficult and impractical, and since Steiner also had an interest in synthesizer circuitry, he decided to attempt a valve-controlled synthesizer instead. In 1972, Steiner released the prototype of what they called the Electronic Valve Instrument (or EVI). In 1975 Steiner and Parker moved their company out of the basement and into a headquarters in Salt Lake City and began releasing production versions of the EVI. Between 1975 and 1979, approximately 200 units were produced and sold mainly to performing groups (including Earth Wind and Fire) and to universities with adventurous electronic music departments.
The EVI used electronic circuitry to translate trumpet fingering and air pressure into control voltage which was sent to an analog synthesizer. The earliest EVIs could only offer on/off tone generation via a breath-activated gate CV and, unlike the Lyricons, they had no onboard synthesis of their own. Steiner often paired the EVI as a set with his MicroCon analog synthesizer box and it was the MicroCon that generated the actual sounds. Sound was triggered by blowing into the breath pipe of the EVI, which activated an air pressure sensor. The EVI was actually airtight so air did not flow through it like a normal wind instrument: instead the performer had to allow air to escape around the mouthpiece. Three spring-loaded switches were positioned to emulate trumpet valves and control the pitch. Later versions of the EVI allowed the player to manipulate volume via a breath transducer that allowed full dynamic expression based on air pressure. They also featured upgrades such as a vibrato switch and a “bite sensor” in the mouthpiece for portamento.
In 1979, Steiner-Parker, much like Computone, found itself struggling to stay afloat financially. Steiner-Parker ultimately dissolved and Nyle Steiner began a relationship with Crumar, an Italian synthesizer company. Thanks to Crumar’s name recognition as well as the money they put behind manufacturing and marketing, the Crumar version (labeled simply as Steiner, not Steiner-Parker) of the EVI sold around 500 units (more than double what Steiner-Parker had managed to sell on their own) and was ultimately adopted by musicians such as Bruce Cassidy of Blood, Sweat and Tears.
The introduction of MIDI in 1982 changed electronic music forever. Unlike Bernardi, who continued to tinker with newer but still analog versions of the Lyricon and steadfastly resisted MIDI until he passed away in 2014, Steiner immediately embraced the new technology. He began working on a hardware interface that allowed the Crumar EVI to transmit MIDI note on/off, aftertouch, pitch bend, and volume. Crumar, however, refused to add MIDI to its version of the EVI (or any of the other synthesizers they manufactured), a shortsighted mistake that led to Crumar discontinuing the EVI in 1984 and ultimately folding entirely in 1987.
Despite Crumar’s refusal to implement MIDI, Steiner knew it was the way of the future. As his partnership with Crumar wound down, he continued to develop a MIDI interface which he eventually began to custom build and sell directly to EVI users who wanted MIDI capability. Steiner also began prototyping the EWI, or Electronic Woodwind Instrument (originally named the “Steinerphone”).
Steiner originally conceived the EWI as simply an EVI that used woodwind fingering instead of trumpet valves. However, he immediately ran into trouble fitting the number of mechanical switches required for woodwind fingering onto the body of his instrument: there simply wasn’t enough space. He ultimately decided to substitute touch keys – basically open metal contacts which the user could ground out with their fingers, much like modern-day touch capacitance sensors – in place of the mechanical switches. The smaller size of the touch keys allowed him to fit more of them into the space he had and place them closer together, allowing him to better simulate woodwind instruments. Because the keys were no longer mechanical, he was also able to make them programmable – users could change the function of each key to simulate the layout of different instruments or even make their own custom fingering. However, because the keys were now touch sensitive, woodwind players who were used to resting their fingers on the keys of their acoustic instruments had to adapt to hovering over them instead.
The touch keys concept worked so well that Steiner decided to create a prototype of the EVI that used the touch keys in place of the mechanical trumpet-valve switches. With the extra space that this freed up, Steiner was able to add three “trill keys” to the side of the valve keys, which allowed users to create their own alternate fingering combinations and also trill notes faster and less awkwardly. Around this time, Steiner also added an “External In” feature to his instruments which allowed his wind instruments to manipulate sounds generated by an external synthesizer.
These latest prototypes of the EVI and EWI caught the attention of Japanese electronics giant Akai, who bought the rights in 1986 and began marketing their own fully-MIDI-capable versions a year later. While they initially offered both the EVI and EWI, the EVI did not sell as well and was discontinued in 1990. The EWI turned out to be much more popular. It spawned several subsequent releases, and a version of it is still for sale to this day as the Akai EWI 5000. Steiner, meanwhile, returned to his roots as a professional musician: after working on the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now while commuting from Salt Lake City, he relocated to California and made a career as a studio musician (mostly performing on his own EWI and EVI) for film and television productions. He is still performing, composing, and tinkering to this day.
OTHER NOTABLE WIND INSTRUMENTS/CONTROLLERS IN OUR COLLECTION INCLUDE:
Maestro W-2 / W-3
The Maestro W-2 Sound System for Woodwinds is not technically a wind synthesizer/controller; instead it is an effects unit that was designed and built to work with reed-based woodwind instruments, specifically clarinet and saxophone. We decided to include it in this article because it is one of the first electronic music accessories designed specifically for use with wind instruments: with an initial release in 1967, it actually predates everything else in this article by several years. The Maestro W-2 consisted of the effects unit itself along with a special pickup designed to be placed on the mouthpiece of a woodwind instrument. The pickup required drilling into the mouthpiece of the instrument and once that happened, the mouthpiece (or barrel, in the case of the clarinet) often became a permanent part of the effects setup since it was no longer good for acoustic playing. Our unit pictured above came with three mouthpieces, for saxophone, clarinet, and, oddly since the W-2 was not designed for it, trumpet. The original pickup cables were also commonly damaged or lost: you can see that the three mouthpieces included with our instrument above each have replacement Shure pickups attached. (Also, interestingly, our unit is labeled as a Maestro W-3, not a W-2: we believe the only difference between the two models is that the W-3 includes the foot pedal selector switch – the effects unit itself appears to be identical.)
There is an input selector on the unit that allows you to choose between saxophone and clarinet: this basically only affects the volume, with the clarinet setting getting more boost than the saxophone. The W-2 has the same bright orange, light blue and golden yellow color scheme sported by other Maestro effects units of the era. There are several selector buttons for various patches that emulate different instruments including tuba, bass clarinet, bassoon, English Horn, and the famous Oboe D’Amore used by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on “Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague,” from 1969’s Uncle Meat. Interestingly, one of the W-2’s patches is labeled Fuzz Tone: it actually runs the signal through the same fuzz circuit used in the famous Maestro Fuzz Tone pedal. The user can select as many of the patches as they want and all of the selected sounds will be played at the same time. There is also a Tremolo setting which allows for a vibrato effect to be applied to the signal. The Maestro W-2 is significant because it represents one of the earliest attempts to apply electronic effects to the sound of a woodwind instrument.
Jim Scott/Moog Prototype
This is a prototype wind controller built by Jim Scott on his own time while working for Moog Music in the early 1970s. Like Nyle Steiner, Scott was a wind player with, in his own words, “zippo keyboard skills” so he designed a wind controller so that he could play the Minimoog as well as the Micromoog that was then under development. Scott handcrafted the body of this instrument from balsa wood. This prototype appears more closely related to the Lyricon than the EVI/EWI since air passes through the body of the instrument itself instead of needing to escape around the mouthpiece. It features some mechanical switch keys like the Lyricon but it also has some touch sensitive keys like the later versions of the EVI/EWI. Scott’s handwritten notes accompanying this prototype show several different possible fingerings including a modified Boehm saxophone fingering. The notes also show plans for a lip/bite sensor but it is not present on the instrument: we are not sure whether it was removed at some point or if it never existed at all. According to Scott, the prototype lacked any sort of articulation: his next step was going to be to add a gate/trigger or ADSR type envelope based on wind pressure to allow legato vs. staccato playing. This was never implemented, and so according to Scott, the most that this prototype was ever able to do was play a musical scale without any articulation. Nevertheless, this device gives an interesting look into what might have been if Moog had decided to invest in creating its own wind controller.
Steiner Master’s Touch
Released in the early 1980s under the Steiner/Crumar partnership, the Master’s Touch was originally designed as a breath controller for the Crumar Stratus but could be connected to almost any audio device. Conceived as a mass-market wind controller, its $200 price tag made it much more accessible to the general public than Steiner’s more expensive offerings. It allows the user to add a resonant Steiner voltage-controlled filter to any audio output as well as control any instrument that has a voltage-controlled input by breathing into and biting on the attached tubes. It originally came with connection cables and breathing tubes. The Master’s Touch has the same breath-controlled VCA and VCF design as the original Steiner EVI and mimics that instrument very well. When hooked to a monophonic synth with no envelope modulation, almost any waveform can be transformed into a convincing-sounding wind instrument. It is interesting to note that the owner’s manual for this instrument was written by EMEAPP’s technical advisor Tom Rhea.
Yamaha WX7 and WX11
If any instrument can be considered as the continuation of the Lyricon’s legacy, it is the Yamaha WX7. Yamaha had adopted the idea of breath-controlled synthesizers as early as 1983 with the release of the CS01 keyboard, and the company included a breath-control input on many of their subsequent synthesizer releases including the famous DX7. Alas, the breath controller that Yamaha originally created for those synths was nothing but a “sawed off melodica”: players complained that it was ugly, difficult to use, and often forced them to hyperventilate while playing. Yamaha realized that they needed to offer their users something better and in 1984 they hired Sal Gallina, an early adopter of the Lyricon and Wind Synthesizer Driver, to create a top-of-the-line MIDI-capable wind controller. Gallina, like Bernardi and Steiner before him, was a musician who had been tinkering with electronics since the late 1960s – he once took the neck off his saxophone and wired it up to relays and circuits to control an ARP synthesizer. By the mid-80s, Gallina had been making a living for years as a studio musician playing the Lyricon and Wind Synthesizer Driver: he was an enthusiastic fan of the Lyricon and attributed its failure purely to “bad marketing” and not any flaw in the instrument’s design itself. Therefore, Gallina modeled Yamaha’s new WX7 controller directly after the Lyricon, admitting: “We MIDI-fied it and that’s it. The keys are the same – the same kind of feel.” Like the Lyricon, the WX7 had a breath-controlled transducer, a sax-style mouthpiece with a plastic “reed” and a lip pressure sensor, and a series of buttons to shift octaves. The keys were mechanical (Gallina was not a fan of the touch-sensitive keys of the EWI/EVI) but they were also completely adjustable, allowing players to customize it for whatever fingering they wanted. The WX7 was powered by a small battery pack worn around the waist, making it extremely easy to move around the stage: the only thing tethering the user was the MIDI cable connected to the synthesizer. And the WX7 was fully MIDI capable and could even send data on more than one MIDI channel simultaneously, opening a whole new world of chords and multiple instrument possibilities to wind players who until that point had always been restricted to a single note at a time.
Released in 1987, the WX7 was an instant hit, but it was complex, expensive (at around $995 USD) and required a connection to an entirely separate synthesizer to receive the MIDI and create the sounds. (The WX7 came with detailed instructions and a demo tape that encouraged users to pair it with Yamaha’s approximately $600 TX81Z rack mount synth, but any MIDI-capable synthesizer would work.) In 1988, wanting a simpler package that they could market to people who did not already own a synth, Yamaha created the WX11 wind controller and its associated synth module, the WT11. Yamaha sold this package for the same list price as the WX7 alone.
The WT11 was a digital FM synthesizer that had four FM operators, 8 note polyphony, 10 digital effects and limited internal memory. The WX11 controller was considered simpler and easier to use than the WX7 but was missing some advanced features such as the thumb-controlled pitch bend wheel. Both the WX7 and WX11 developed their own loyal followings and the two instruments would go on to great success over the next decade.
Berglund Instruments NuRAD Prototype
Thanks to Stuart Diamond, who connected us with Johan Berglund, the newest addition to EMEAPP’s collection of wind controllers is this amazing prototype of the Berglund Instruments NuRAD. Back in 2015, Johan Berglund, a computer technician from Sweden, took up Arduino programming as a hobby. He built his first two homebrew wind controllers in 2016, publishing his process on the maker forum hackaday.io. He was contacted by EVI player Steve Anderson who was in the middle of trying to recreate his own version of the long-discontinued Akai EVI and hoped to use some of Berglund’s ideas. By 2018, the two men had developed working prototypes of a new version of the EVI based around a Teensy 3.2 development board. Their beta testers began sharing photos and videos on social media, attracting the attention of Nyle Steiner himself, who liked the design and offered to pitch in on the development. After a few tweaks, the first production NuEVI began shipping to a waitlist that had already grown quite long.
The NuEVI was very successful and EWI players began clamoring for their own updated version which Berglund spent the next few years developing. Called the NuRAD, Berglund’s EWI was based on the side-by-side design of the RAD EWI built by Nyle Steiner for Michael Brecker in 2004 (Steiner had continued to tinker and release one-off instruments after selling his initial designs to AKAI). The idea of side-by-side keys was revolutionary. Until that point, wind controllers had always followed the layout of an analog wind instrument: a single physical tube where the fingering changes the way that the air moves through the tube and thus changes the pitch. Legend has it that Steiner was reading a paperback book when he realized his side-by-side hand positioning would be very suitable for playing, and since there was no physical air flowing through his controllers, there was no need to keep the traditional “tube-based” key placement. The NuRAD also incorporated the pneumatic bite sensor from the Crumar Master’s Touch but Berglund wasn’t happy with the performance of the bite sensor’s pressure equalization ability. Interestingly, Nyle Steiner had already worked this issue out by incorporating the valve cores from automobile tires, and at Steiner’s suggestion, this solution was incorporated into the NuRAD.
The NuRAD features touch-capacitance keys that are programmable for multiple functions including responsiveness control, overblowing, custom pitch bend, and double-stops (playing two notes simultaneously). Like Steiner’s original EWI, the touchkeys require players to hover their fingers over the keys instead of resting on them as they would with an acoustic instrument which required a significant adjustment in playing technique. The NuRAD fingerings can be changed at the touch of a button, from the Boehm clarinet-style fingering to sax to brass. The back of the NuRAD has 8 rollers used to control octave shifting: each roller corresponds to an octave, giving the NuRAD a whopping 8-octave range – far more than acoustic wind instruments or even other wind controllers.
Both the NuEVI and the NuRAD are wind controllers only: they have no onboard sounds of their own and must be hooked up to an external synthesizer to generate the sound. The Berglund controllers are unique in that they are a hybrid of MIDI and analog: they have an analog output that can control synths with direct input to VCOs and VCAs and also a MIDI output that can communicate with digital synths. Both outputs can be used at the same time: in the Electric Diamond videos from the concert held at EMEAPP (see below), Stuart Diamond is using his NuRAD to control a fully analog Moog Sirin and a digital Akai synth at the same time, running their signals through a Roland Boss GT-1 multi-effects pedal and mixing via foot pedals to create a rich sound palette that combines, in his words, both “analog warmth and digital complexity.”
EMEAPP Interviews: Stuart Diamond
Want to know more about Electronic Wind Instruments? Here’s your chance to learn directly from Stuart Diamond! He recently sat down with EMEAPP’s own Mike Hunter for a chat about the history of EWIs in general. He talks about his specific wind instruments and how he uses them in his own compositions and performances. Check it out below:
Live@EMEAPP: Electric Diamond
And here’s your chance to hear Stuart’s wind controller in action as part of the duo Electric Diamond with Don Slepian. Their performance at EMEAPP also included a special guest star, Karen Bentley Pollick, performing on both violin and the Norwegian hardanger fiddle. Check out both parts of their performance below: