Products

History

The Electronic Valve Instrument was invented back in the early 1970s by Nyle Steiner. The first production instruments were using mechanical switches in a handset connected to an analog synthesizer module, and they were sold from 1975 to 1979 by the Steiner-Parker company. When the company had dissolved, the instrument was produced by Crumar.

In the mid 80s, Steiner designed and built a number of instruments with a more complex synthesizer and touch sensing for the keys. They were referred to as Steinerphones, and and came in both brass and woodwind variety.

In 1987 a new type of EVI was licensed and sold by AKAI. This new version together with its woodwind counterpart released at the same time, the EWI, was using touch sensing for the finger controls and a programmable synth module capable of sending MIDI for controlling other synthesizers. The Akai EVI was discontinued due to not selling as well as the EWI that is still made by AKAI in new incarnations.

For a while Nyle Steiner did conversions of then current model EWIs into EVIs, until in 1998 when he started building and selling the MIDI EVI he had developed. The MIDI EVI was built to work as a controller for MIDI equipped synthesizers, with no sound synthesis capability of its own. For several years this has been the controller/instrument of choice for EVI players, even when the newer EWIs got alternative EVI fingering settings.

In recent years the MIDI EVI has become hard to come by. Steiner has moved on to many other projects and interests, and so very few new EVIs are being built. In 2012 he posted a YouTube video demonstrating a prototype for NuEVI and NuRAD User Guide 2an Arduino based EVI that people could build themselves. In 2017 it was still unclear when the Arduino EVI kit would be available. As the only available EVI would be in kit form and not available as a pre-built instrument, some EVI players started to get a bit concerned about the future of the EVI. With no new instruments being built, the EVI would eventually die. In hope to prevent this, EVI player Steve Anderson initiated a project aiming to create a new EVI. After teaming up with Johan Berglund moving forward with the project, the NuEVI was born.

As popularity of the NuEVI grew, EWI players started to get in touch, wanting an EWI counterpart to the NuEVI. When development was initiated for this new EWI, a number of factors pointed to the RAD EWI as the suitable version to modernize and build for people. The original RAD MIDI EWI was made by Nyle in 2004, for saxophone and EWI player Michael Brecker. The RAD EWI featured a new, radical, redesign putting the keys for left and right hands side by side, and having handles attached so it could be played without the use of a neck strap. Michael Brecker was very pleased with this new controller and used it on tour. No additional RAD EWIs were made though, and the controller could have become just this one-off mythical beast.

Development of the NuRAD was done in parallel with building NuEVIs and while it took more than a year to get it all ready, some ideas for the NuRAD would also be available as optional features for the NuEVI, the PneuBite in particular. The PneuBite is based on the bite sensor in the vintage Steiner Master’s Touch system, and rather than measuring capacitance between two strips of metal, it senses the air pressure in a closed system where squeezing or bending the mouthpiece will alter the pressure. As an improvement over the original, a pressure valve is added, allowing for equalization to ambient air pressure.