I´m just curious if anyone is using a breath controller for their A4? I´ve never tried one, but it sounds interesting.
I tried connecting an ewi5000 to digitakt auto channel but it didn’t really work as expected (note off was weird)… didn’t really put in the time to go through all the midi settings for the ewi though
With a breath controller, EWI4000 here, I have the option to create wind-instrument like behaviour and experimenting with sound shapings, which IMO would sometimes be hard to do with a keyboard and expression pedals.
If you’re interested in this or even in experimenting, continue to read 
- We have the air-flow and biting the mouthpiece at the same time as two options to control expression of the sound.
- To control the volume or other attributes of a sound, we can change the airflow by blowing soft, or hard, or anything inbetween, like on a real wind-instrument.
- The EWI recognizes “tonguing” on the mouthpiece and translates this to typical accentuations, even very fast, and I have no idea, how I could achieve this technique on a keyboard.
Those examples are feasible with the mouthpiece only, no faders, nor expression pedals needed. IMO a very efficient method for sound expression in a live situation.
Only thing to consider is that the typical ADSR of a synth is not useful for this, if the breath controler is used to trigger the ADSR only.
Example for the emulation of a wind-instrument would be:
- set attack to very short
- set decay to very short
- control sustain/volume with the breath controllers “breath”-CC (this might take a look in the manual and the midi implementation chart of the synth)
- set release very short
Now blow the breath-controller, create new sound experiences, and have fun 
Generally speaking I would say that patching a synth for use with a breath controller is different compared to patching for a typical keyboard or a sequencer.
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I get it why, but how would you reach this on e.g. an Elektron synth then?
Good point … I did it on a Moog … wasn’t that hard to set up … give me some time to check the Elektron manuals
Edit: Error above … was a Prophet-8 (see below)
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There is nothing about triggering a sound differently (as in : bypassing the envelope).
If I understand what you said above, one would have to somehow link the “tonguing” you’re talking about to the attack/decay of the envelope.
I have to dig this, because IMO it’s a very interesting way to “play” the sound, as opposed to a (almost binary) keyboard.
Oops … I have to correct myself 
… did it on my Prophet-8 … good that I tend to take notes sometimes …
Here we go with my concept of a P-8 patch, which might be able to be translated to the A4 hopefully …
EWI Breath CTRL (should be CC 02 on most synths):
–> P-8 Amp Amount (could be OSC-LEV or AMP-VOL on an A4)
–> P-8 Velocity
As far as I understand the A4 correctly, there is no mod-matrix to route any sources to any destinations like on some other synths. This means that translating the P-8 patch to the A4 is a bit more tricky than I thought.
But we have an option in the SOUND MENU, where single controls can be assigned to up to 5 parameters. It’s like the performance macros. If we select BREATH CONTROLLER and hit “yes”, we can assign modulation by BREATH (CC02) to almost any parameter of the synth. For this reply I checked on the envelopes and volumes only, which are available, but the list seems to be very complete.
Just to have it mentioned … the envelope phases for the AMP ADSR are accessible by CC directly as follows: A=CC104, D=CC105, S=CC106, R=CC107. Volume=CC07.
The “tonguing” is a very quick change of the air-flow, from zero to max. This generates a hard staccato on wind-instruments and since our tongue can move very quicly, this can generate quite many and rhythimc notes in short time. If the BREATH is linked to whatever parameter we want, this translates quite good to many sound modulations
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