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and I began to discuss what was possiblefrom there and what he’d like to do, and I’dfigure out how to do it. I could see that hewas really serious about making this go,spending hours at a time in his basementworking on it, so it became apparent that heneeded the fastest possible access to every-thing he’d want to do with the input fromthe EWI.

So I made channel strips that came beforeeach instrument, comprised of macros con-trolling things such as transposition, pressurescaling, volume scaling, note-range limiting,and various data filters, with everything pre-sented as a simple numbered sliding fader orswitch. Once Logic hit version 7 and webegan incorporating Audio Units instrumentsdirectly into Logic’s environment, Judd Millerbegan supplying a steady stream of incredibleEWI-friendly sounds, mostly for Kontakt.

As the performance developed, we put inthings such as a “universal sustain” that, ifenabled on any channel strip, would makethat sound hold if Mike had played C8 on theEWI, and release when he played B7. Severaldifferent sounds could be held at once thisway, and Mike became very adept at layeringup a very sophisticated thing quickly, thenreleasing it and doing another.

I also created a Logic-based version ofOberheim’s “rotate” mode, a programmableharmony generator that rotated between sev-eral different intervallic combinations for eachincoming note, producing a changing seriesof chords from a single-note line. Our rotatorseventually incorporated several features lack-ing on the original, such as different numbersof notes in the rotation for each rotatingvoice, as well as more available rotating voic-

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Michael Brecker’s LogicPro EWI Environment

(CONTINUED ON PAGE 62)

The Logic environment pictured here,Michael Brecker’s Powerbook EWI setup,started out as a bet sometime in 2004.

Mike had been on the road for 20 years withtwo 4-foot racks packed with synths, sam-plers, mixers, MIDI routers, loopers, andreverbs, topped off with an Oberheim Matrix12 synth, from which he would perform aone-man EWI masterpiece every night in themiddle of the set.

It typically featured a couple hundred dif-ferent sounds, layered ethnic bits, various leadsounds, drums, basses, percussion, a fewbeautiful polyphonic pieces (out of the mono-phonic EWI), and huge distorted guitars. Mikeended it with a big layered jam, created oneline at a time on Lexicon’s Jam-Man, in whichhe would layer up a groove and a bunch ofBrecker-only harmonic ideas and then blowover the whole thing.

The EWI solo was always a show-stopper;in Mike’s hands a lot of it seemed like magic,and one day when I mentioned that I bet we

could get the whole thing to happen on aPowerBook, Mike took me up on it. He alsospecified that he wanted to be on stage withonly a wireless EWI—no pedals or switches—which presented an interesting challenge,since the EWI really only puts out notes, pres-sure, program changes, pitch bend, and acouple of assignable controllers.

Apple Logic Pro’s Environment, which iswhere the audio and MIDI pathways are setup, provides an excellent set of tools toaccomplish most anything one could want ina live performance or studio situation, fromsimple tasks and time-savers to incrediblysophisticated concepts. When we started outwith it, Logic was still only revised to 6.4.3,which meant that only one instrument couldbe active at a given time.

This wouldn’t work for Mike, who oftenlayered eight or ten things at once, and step-ping up and down the track list via key com-mands was too buggy to use anyway, so wetried using Propellerhead Reason as a ReWireinstrument for our sound source. Reason issuch a well-written and efficient instrumentthat we were off and running in short order,with Reason accommodating even difficultrequests easily (its MIDI implementation androuting capabilities are quite thorough, forexample).

Mike always presented himself as a kind oftechno-klutz, but those of us who knew himwell understood that he was really a kind ofunique genius both on the technical end andin the fusing of the technology with greatmusicianship. His ideas for things were oftenunusual and insightful, and he was absolutelyadept at getting what he wanted out of themachine.

After starting with a basic cable-switcherand some transformers to get it going, Mike

The late great woodwind player’s keyboard playerworked with him to put together an amazingly sophis-ticated real-time environment for his Akai ElectricWind instrument.

By George Whitty

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TRENDS(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 64)

es and various lights to provide feedbackwhen programming it.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to gettogether on the PowerBook was the replace-ment of the Lexicon Jam-Man delay-loop boxwith a software looping device. Logic’s owndelays didn’t do an infinite repeat (the maxi-mum feedback was 99%, slowly losing levelwith each repeat), but after some looking wefound the Augustus Looper, which did every-thing we needed it to do and was easy tocontrol via MIDI commands.

The difficult thing with it was that Mikeneeded two separate loops and the ability toswitch between them instantly; this part ofthe performance had always consisted ofbuilding up one section (the way Mike gotthis swinging as he built it up always remind-ed me of the Basie band), then switching tothe B loop and building up the “bridge.”Mike would then start to solo on it, andswitch between the two loops as he went.

I eventually decided to work the switchingout by controlling input levels to the twobusses via note-ons; if Mike played somethinglike F0 on the EWI, it would turn the volumeson bus “A” to O and the bus “B” volumes off,thus loading up the A loop. Playing F#0

would reverse them and allow input into theB loop. This whole system required a lot ofthought; everything had to be done justright, but Mike eventually mastered it. Oneby one, we solved all the problems weencountered, and the PowerBook EWI (even-tually migrated to an iMac G5 for quad out-puts and more horsepower) was realized.

In early 2005, Mike was diagnosed withmyelodysplastic syndrome, a kind of precur-sor to leukemia. With that, the EWI projectbecame something more than an instrumentor a performance tool to both Mike and me.It was something he could work on evenwhen chemotherapy had left him too fried toplay the tenor, and he did so with a greatspirit and passion.

To me, it was something I could do withmy friend that always seemed to give him alift; Mike would always muster himself andwe’d make each other laugh the whole timewe worked on it, even when he was having ahard time getting up the stairs. We continuedto work on it through December of 2006,adding things like an array of transformersthat enabled an instant, separately pro-grammed quadraphonic mix, and making asampled version of Mike’s tenor and buildinga network of controllers so it could be playedrealistically on the EWI.

Mike did some excellent recording sessions

on the EWI when he felt up to it, soundinggreat as always, and took advantage of abreak in the chemo to make one last gor-geous record on both tenor and EWI,“Pilgrimage,” which will come out in May.

Mike passed away on January 13th of thisyear, after fighting tooth and nail against ahorrible disease.

It’s hard for me to even look at the originalEWI now. A lot of this technology lives on inmy road setup, and now in Herbie Hancock’slive rig. But it all started off with Mike’s EWIand, typical of us, we never thought to makea recording of the incredible end-product ofit, though I’m hopeful that as I’m helping hiswife Susan go through his computer in June,we might find a MIDI recording he made.

Mike paid me to do most of this work, butthe truth is that this project was (and I thinkMike would agree) more like a great tree-house that I built with one of my best friendsone especially nice summer. I look at it andremember the thousands of laughs we hadtrying to get the damned thing to work right,cracking each other up with every absurditythat came into our heads. For such an intensemusician, Mike was a very light, gentle, oftensilly and extremely funny person, and I misshim every single day. I’ve been blessed with anumber of very good friends, but there wasonly one Michael Brecker. VI

The first item in the datastream is this channel-switch-er. Incoming programchanges cause the switcher toselect different cables, whichare attached to the terminaltransformers, labeled with thenumber of the incoming pro-gram change. Cables are thendrawn from there to whateverin the environment we wantto address. Next to the pro-gram change number is thenote fingered on the EWI tosend the program change.

We both agreed that Arturia’sMinimoog is a fantastic device, perfectfor playing with the EWI. But it seemedto use an awful lot of power even just sit-ting there, so in order to keep only oneof them inserted, we had this little set ofprogram change translators to addressthat one instance. Incoming programchanges would be changed into whatev-er we wanted to play on the Moog withthese macros. As with most objects inthis environment, clicking and sliding onthese boxes changes the value.

One of the 56 channel strips; each box is avalue modifier for a macro that performs a func-tion, scaling volume, setting note ranges, trans-posing, enabling or disabling pitch bend or aglobal sustain feature, which is triggered by thetop two notes of the EWI. Pressure can also betranslated into mod wheel by percentage toaffect additional parameters of the synth.

Running the EWI in Quad presented an interesting dilemma. Itwasn’t as simple as putting up the surround faders and placingthings, since everything had to feed busses with the AugustusLoopers on them to be part of the loops, and there was no way toget the busses downstream of the quad faders. I decided toaddress all the quad issues by using two busses, one of which fedthe fronts, the other of which fed the rears. Same with Reason;every instrument fed two mixers, one for the fronts and one for therears, which were then ReWired into Logic to feed the loopers.

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In Mike’s performances with his rackrigs, he always had a segment wherehe’d build up an arrangement using aLexicon Jam-Man looper. We recreatedthis idea, in quad this time, using sever-al Augustus Looper plug-ins, one eachfor Front loops 1 & 2 and Rear loop 1 & 2. Mike wanted to be on stage with only a wireless EWI, so a great many functions were con-trolled by note-ons at the very low end of the 8-octave range (the “trash octaves?”). Mike could start record, go to “play” and blow,freeze it, clear it and fade it out using note-ons selected with these macros, then go to a second loop and build up another one (the“bridge”), then switch between the two as he soloed over the top. I also put in a separate looper, used to create different kinds of loopedambient textures.

This is the master bussingtransformer that carries the“universal sustain” ons andoffs, as well as other bits ofinformation such as an all-notes-off panic button, to allthe objects; there’s a switchin each row that eitherenabled or disabled the sus-tain function for each track.The most recent version ofNile Steiner’s EWI features asustain switch, but Mike pre-ferred to use that more for akind of instant sustain, tobuild a quick chord for exam-ple, rather than somethingthat carried across several dif-ferent sounds like the univer-sal switch can. The universalsustain was toggled by twodifferent notes on the EWI,usually the two highest.

We tried hard as hell tomake a really realistic, playablesampled version of Mike’s sax.This idea was worked up onseveral instances of Reason’soriginal sampler, the NN-19,because it allowed MIDI con-trol of parameters we needed,such as sample start time.There were four different NN-19s with samples of differentintensities, selected by the lastpressure value before thenote-on. This series of macrosand transformers took pres-sure information and translat-ed it into such things as sam-ple start time and attack time(playing softly started thesample progressively later,after the initial attack, andadded a little time to theattack parameter) and also rana novel attempt at faking“more intensity” by both turn-ing up the level on a wideband of upper-mid EQ andsweeping the frequency up

somewhat as pressure increased. We eventually got this to where Mike enjoyed playing it, but itnever really reached its full potential, mostly because in the initial thrill of the chase the originalsampling wasn’t done all that carefully.

Oberheim’s “rotate mode” on steroids, this harmony generator (the secret to how Mike gotchord progressions out of the monophonic EWI) features three fixed-interval voices and two thatrotate between two, three, or four selectable intervals. Any note played into this would be harmo-nized by the three fixed intervals and two notes that “rotated” between the values chosen in theblue and green boxes. I found it interesting that Mike always had some voices rotating above thenote he was playing, meaning he never quite knew what his top note would be, but he had a realgift for getting great progressions out of this thing. The eight small boxes on the left light up eachtime that voice is activated, so by playing slowly we can see who’s doing what to the harmony andadjust accordingly. This system is so packed with macros that it exceeds the limit to pack the wholething (I think 256 objects) so it sits there with all its guts exposed.

The objects at “10” set up input parameters to the 12 rotators; Mike often had just a coupleoctaves sent to the rotator, with two more for bass, one for sound effects, and a couple for a leadinstrument, all on the same program change. The instruments at “11” were each panned to thefour corners of the room; in quad, that 12th rotator sent each incoming note bouncing around theroom (or distributed the four notes of a chord to a different speaker each). When Mike overdubbeda few passes into the looper with this thing in it turned into a real carnival ride. At “12” is an extrarotator that sits before the sequencer input so Mike could record its output as MIDI. The rotator,properly programmed, can sometimes come up with surprisingly great progressions, which Mikewanted to be able to record and look at as an idea for a tune. I use them for certain sorts of thingsin the writing I do, for example to harmonize a fast string line instantly for a certain sort of sound.The very sharp-eyed will notice a couple devices in this thing from the collection of Len Sasso,Godfather of the Environment, from whose work I’ve learned a lot.

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