Ok, I have had the Aerophone Pro for about two months now. And there are some things it does well, and some……..that need work. Let’s start with the stuff it does well.
First, I really like the mouthpiece/reed thing. It feels more “sax like”. Pitch bending, while it can be done with this weird little thumb lever thing, can be done with the mouthpiece. Like a sax would. The Akai EWI’s, you have to do it with your thumb (hitting a touch area above or below).
Second, the “palm keys”, the forked F, and the pinky keys are great. Again, it feels more like playing a sax.
Third, it is really responsive while playing it. Responsive as in I didn’t need to tweak anything to get it it where I wanted. My EWI 4000 I had to really tweak a bunch of settings until the sound delay was to my liking.
Ok……….so the stuff that needs work……
Obviously…..the key noise. I still is a problem. Slightly better as it gets “broken in” but………..it’s loud. And still feels sorta “cheap”.
The editing of sounds. There needs to be some sort of computer editor or something. While you can do editing, sorta, on the iPad or iPhone, it’s not great. And you can’t save them other than to your app. This is a HUGE stupid oversight by Roland. No ability to SHARE patches. I mean…….what? There isn’t even a SYSEX dump as far as I can tell. I did dig into the MIDI that it does, and I think you could, in theory, maybe create a program to edit sounds, but……why Roland hasn’t done this, I am clueless. This hobbles the instrument. One of the great things about the Akai EWI 4000s was the creating custom sounds (Patchman, and others).
The default sounds…..need work. Like, almost all of them are just so heavy with effects…….delays and reverbs……….it’s just too much. The Guitar/Bass section……not sure why anyone would want to attempt to use a folk guitar with this. On the flip side, the synths are great…..after some tweaking……and the ethnic section is fun. But a lot of these require work, and the editor app is just not really that great to do the work in. And if you tweak a bunch of these, are they going to survive when Roland issues another OS update to the device? Is there a way to BACK UP all the stuff? I don’t see any way to do that………
Conclusion……
I’m still torn on this. While I see a huge potential, the instrument is crippled by Roland. The inability to share patches, or just SAVE THEM off the device to a file, limits the true potential of this instrument. Why give us an instrument that is “ZEN-Core Synthesis System” but a POS editor for it. Dumb. Really dumb.