Update, November 2019: Not sure what the future is for this product. I feel I should make an updated successor. My professional range of wind controllers take very much of my focus right now, but I hope I can have developments from those trickle down to these more simple controllers in a good way, for both EWI and EVI versions. For now I'm keeping this product up here on Tindie. There might be builds showing up sporadically up for grabs, and when the new product is done, it will be shown here too.

What is it?

The T.WI is a highly portable but still very competent and expressive woodwind controller for USB MIDI. It features capacitive touch keys, a NXP pressure sensor for breath and a thumb joystick for pitch bend, modulation and glide (portamento) control.

Why did you make it?

I created this because I found the currently available controllers on the market to be too big and heavy. I wanted something the size of a recorder that I could fit in my pocket.

What makes it special?

Aside from its teensy size, it is made from cool UV reactive perspex that will look awesome on stage or in your blacklight lit chill out room. Actually, it always looks cool. And it is awesome to play. It will work great with the breath control softsynth patch collections available on the market, and it is configurable to fit synths that work better with aftertouch or volume CC rather than breath CC. Also, with a MIDI USB host adapter it will work well with DIN MIDI hardware synths.

Get started with wind controllers

The aspect of a continuously varying control of volume and/or filter cutoff via breath pressure requires some effort from the receiving end, i.e. the synthesizer. The de facto standard for setting up wind controller patches is to have the synth respond to continuous controller #2, breath, and route it to control filter cutoff and possibly also amp volume. For synths not responding to CC#2, the T.WI can be configured to send other sensible CC numbers and/or aftertouch (channel pressure) instead. For more info on wind controllers, check out the Wind Controller FAQ at Patchman Music.

The T.WI fingering

The fingering of the T.WI is based on the Akai EWI and the Casio DH series. It is pretty similar to playing the Recorder, and very easy to get started with if you are familiar with any Boehm system instrument.

Fingering and settings guide can be found here.

What is included?

• 1x ready-built and tested T.WI woodwind controller
• 2x mouthpieces made from food grade silicone tubing
• 1x Micro USB cable, 2m length (color matched if available, else black)
• 1x user manual with charts for fingerings and settings

What is not included?

• Any kind of synthesizer or software for producing the actual sound