Ha Ha. Yes, I have just bought (rather foolishly) an EWI, thinking that I could easily use it to make MIDI recordings instead of using the keyboard as the MIDI input. I am not so skilled on the keyboard. So I thought if I get a wind controller, I can close the lid on my piano keyboard and instead pick up the wind controller and play that, after all I can play much better and faster on the flute than on the piano. I thought what fun, I can use the EWI to play all the different midi instrument sounds available.
It was only after I got the EWI I discovered how fundamentally different wind instruments are from percussive instruments like the piano. When you press a note on the keyboard it sends a MIDI note on, with the velocity controlling how loud you play the instrument. However playing a note on the EWI it always sends a midi note on with a velocity just above zero. This is because when you start blowing the sound level starts from zero then builds up. A wind controller and all wind instruments (non percussive instruments) do not have a ADSR envelope but instead use the MIDI breath controller for the attack and sustain levels in real time. For that reason trying to use a wind controller to play instruments like the piano or guitar won't really work out.
I did look at some sound fonts in particular the Fluid (R3) General MIDI SoundFont (GM) but this is a large sound fount and has the vibrato built into the sound loops. However smaller samples like "TimGM6mb.sf2" use have tiny loops without vibrato and use the sound generator engine to provide the vibrato. What is needed is a custom sound font that uses a breath controller to control the volume. There is natural vibrato in the MIDI breath data.
So what would be great if we could somehow add a magic flag to fluidsynth that overrides the global vibrato modulation used on many sound fonts and instead control that with the breath controller input. This would save having to manually edit all the sound fonts to respond to the breath controller.
I will post over the weekend a MIDI recording (with matching audio) of me playing using the EWI and we will see what anybody can do with the MIDI data when fed into fluid synth.
Louis