RolandAlto Horn (AE-01)

I am a 56 year old semi-pro bass player with training in piano for several years. I played the flute for a year or two in elementary school as well. I have been actively gigging for hire in mostly jazz genres for over a decade, can read music and know how to improvise jazz on the bass.I have wanted to get casually into a wind instrument to play jazz standards and the melodies to my own music with backing tracks. I wanted it NOT to be time consuming given my age and many responsibilities. I tried the AKAI USB wind instrument and that proved way too complicated when I started reading the instructions out of the box. I then bought a flute, tried it out a few times and never went back to it. Then I bought the Aerophone AE-01 - the bottom of the line instrument in Roland's Aerophone line.I love it -- it's exactly what I'm looking for to enjoy as quickly as possible. The fingerings are easy and intuitive, much like a flutophone or a recorder. I was able to play the first verse of Fly Me to the Moon, complete with one flat note within a 1/2 hour of opening the box. The controls are EASY and you can play it without hooking it into anything or reading the manual. The speaker in the instrument sounds just OK with the on-board sounds (sax, flute, clarinet, trumpet, violin and synth). But the instrument sounds MUCH better when played through headphones.I had trouble putting it down and I expect I'll be learning to play the songs in the online app you can download until I can play all 12 notes competently.With this purchase, I FINALLY feel like I found something I can get into fast and see results early to motivate me to invest the necessary time to play it in the time I have left on this planet. It really does get around a lot of obstacles that new players face with wind instruments -- tone, complicated fingerings, etcetera. With fast early progress, I feel motivated to pick this instrument up and start learning. I will probably sell the flute and the Akai USB instrument which I hung on to previously -- hoping I would get the motivation to learn them. With the Aerophone AE-01, I have the motivation and no longer need those other two wind instruments cluttering up my house.In spite of the glowing review here, I do have a couple things I would change about it. It comes with a sock that goes at the bottom of the mouthpiece. This is apparently to prevent saliva from dripping down the instrument and going into the electronics. I am glad they have addressed this issue, but I would rather it didn't have the ugly sock on it. The sax sounds pretty awful through the built in speaker, but OK in the headphones. The other sounds were all fine through the headphones. I noticed in all the demos that the instrument sounds much better when played through a sound system and good speakers, so bear that in mind when you play through the built in speaker. It may sound like a toy and definitely not worth hundreds of dollars -- until you plug it into a good speaker/amplification system.I am not worried about the fact there is no known case for it. I want to build my own case as it's pretty small and there are a lot of videos on YouTube that show you how to do it.I will update the review as I gain more experience with the instrument. I still need to try out the app and the lessons. I am looking forward to trying them out!Thanks Roland for taking a chance on a beginner model.****APP Review 1/5I am reviewing the app separately. I downloaded it easily enough to my phone. There is a self-confessed delay between the fingering and the sounds produced through your phone -- it was more pronounced with some sounds compared to others, so I don't think there is a good use for the sounds on the app. How can you play along with a group or a backing track if your sounds are delayed from your fingerings? I found the songs in the app passable, but I don't think I could learn the songs they way they show one note, then the fingering, then the next note, and the fingering. It would be better to have the notes to the songs printable or viewable for the whole song on the phone. Then I could practice the song while looking up the fingerings. Later, after having learned the big picture, I could then play along with it as intended. The metronome is the bright spot of the app -- easy to use and important for learning to play in time. So, I hope Roland fixes the sound delay problem on the app -- I was really disappointed. There were quite a few usable sounds in the 50 given, but the delay makes them problematic. I'm surprised they released an instrument with this delay problem at all -- they should have fixed it before releasing this admittedly expensive starter instrument!*****Update a couple months later....Still going stronger and stronger with this instrument. I am finding it easier and easier to pick up new songs, primarily jazz. I have played it three times with a band now. Once live before an audience at a jazz jam (Swingin' Shepherd Blues), and twice at a piano trio jazz practice, doubling parts with a violin player. One thing -- if you want other musicians to take it seriously, you need to run it through a PA system. The internal speaker on the instrument itself, while a stellar feature to encourage convenience, doesn't do the instrument justice on the sax, clarinet, and trumpet settings. I did have one player, someone with a personality I'm not that fond of under the best of circumstances, call it a toy, but the other musicians found it sounded good. One with ears I respect indicating he really liked the sound of it. I expect to integrate this into my live, paid gigs as I gain more and more experience with it. I absolutely love this instrument, and consider it credible even in a paid performance environment.By the way, I lost the black saliva sock within a month of owning the instrument. It is loose and falls off easily, so to this day I have no clue where it went in spite of myself and a family member looking everywhere for it. So, I bought children's wrist sweat bands, which come in a lot of different colors instead. I also had Roland send me a new one, but it cost over $8 for one black, ill-fitting sock when I could buy two for the same price here on Amazon. Here is a link to the sweatbands that fit the instrument better than the actual Roland replacement sock I ordered:https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01G9BVTVC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o09_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1The blue ones actually look pretty good. I tried orange, black, and blue, and the blue ones look the best with it, and fit better than the Roland sock.

From being a long-time clarinet and saxophone player, the idea of digital wind instrument piqued my interest, and the Roland Aerophone line seems to be highly recommended by quite a few professional caliber musicians. To be clear, none of these professional musicians use the Aerophones on stage or in concert, but they do recommend them for using at home for fun as well as some of the higher end models actually helping with practicing with real instruments (especially saxophones).So that explains why I purchased the Roland Aerophone Mini AE-01. Unfortunately, I have to strongly disagree on the quality and usefulness of this instrument, especially at this price point. Please do yourself a favor and disregard all other reviews (here, YouTube, etc.) that claim this is has a high quality build -- it simply does not. This feels cheap and plastic like a toy. Another issue right out of the box is the mouthpiece that comes with it. It's supposed to come with the same pseudo "reed" mouthpiece (similar to a clarinet/saxophone), but it instead comes with a much lesser quality cone shaped mouthpiece (Roland op-ae01mp). Honestly, this isn't horrible, but it's not what's shown in the item listing pictures, not what's shown on the Roland website, and not what's shown in all the reviews. If you're never going to graduate up from the AE-01 to the AE-05 or AE-10, then you would probably be fine. However, if you do intend to eventually move up to these other instruments, they both have the pseudo "reed" mouthpiece so it would be completely unfamiliar to you.When attempting to play this instrument, the keys/buttons feel very cheap, and when attempting to play notes their travel and sensitivity is completely unreliable. For example, if you try to play a simple scale quickly, you simply will not be able to the majority of attempts because of the unreliability of the buttons. This should be a key (no pun intended) feature of any music instrument! What's the use of a piano where the keys don't reliably work or a guitar where the strings sometimes just don't make a sound? Honestly, the whole interface is cheap and designed like a toy. To change the sound settings, volume, reverb, etc., you have to press a button the back of the instrument and then press one of the note keys. For the price of this instrument, you would think they would've put a simple LCD screen on the back with 3-4 dedicated navigation buttons to change the settings.Now, one of the main features of this instrument is its ability to connect to your phone/tablet to access the Roland MIDI app specifically designed for this device as well as other MIDI apps. This will give you almost 10x the amount of sounds, as well as provide background karaoke style music, as well as some lessons/tutorials for how to play the instrument, etc. The Roland app seems pretty good, but unfortunately I won't really know how good because I could never get it to reliably connect to my brand new Android 10 phone with Bluetooth 6.0. The 2 or 3 times I was able to finally trick it into connecting, I was less than impressed with the results. First of all, when you select to use a different instrument sound from the Roland app, it doesn't play through the AE-01 -- it plays through your phone speaker(s). There is also a significant delay between playing the note in the AE-01 and the sound coming out of the phone. Again, I'm using a phone that was released two months ago, it has the very latest version of Android, and runs Bluetooth 6. I don't have any other type of lag in bluetooth with this phone -- nothing from wireless headphones, nothing from a wireless gaming controller, etc.In terms of the level of skill required to play this instrument, I'd have to say that it actually requires a lot more skill than Roland and professional reviewers claim. Part of the reason for this is the low quality keys/buttons, but a big part of it is just the fingerings in general. A real clarinet is actually MUCH easier to play. Although the fingerings on a real saxophone are more difficult than a real clarinet, they're still a lot easier than these. For some reason, most people (including Roland) liken the fingerings to that of a recorder (a common flute instrument typically taught to grade school children). This isn't like any recorder I've used. Rounding an octave is almost impossible, but again a lot of that may have to do with the poor quality keys/buttons. I am not professional, but I am rather advanced with a clarinet and saxophone, as well as very good with a recorder, but I can barely play this Aerophone, and given the poor quality of it I seriously doubt I would get that much better with time.All in all, I'm VERY disappointed in the Roland Aerophone Mini AE-01, so much so that I doubt I'll even try the much pricier AE-05 or AE-10. I just don't think it's worth the risk especially at that much higher price. Instead I think I'll just stick to the real thing.

A little of my musical background. I learned to play sax in middle band but became an organist, pianist, and keyboardist (my primary instruments). I am self-taught on all the keyboards and am not a professional musician (although I do play for my church). I also used to own a Casio Digital Horn back in the day.I've been playing the Aerophone Mini for about a week. It was purchased in April for my birthday in July. Other than testing it when it arrived, it was not played until my birthday.The fingering is enough like the sax that it came back quickly. I was easily able to play "Amazing Grace" when I tested in in April.Pros: - Portable and battery operated - Easy (for me) to play. It helps to know the basics of reading music, etc. - Built-in speaker for playing anywhere - Built-in voices sound good when played through (even cheap) headphones or external speakers - App for helping learn and 50 additional voices - App voices sound great through external speakers or headphones - Latency of voices not in issue with my iPhoneCons: - Small built-in speaker resulting in built-in voices not sounding very good or having much volume without external speakers or headphones - Few songs (11) in the app (This may be fixed if the app is updated.) and they tend to advance somewhat rapidly in difficulty from one to the next - Even through external speakers the built-in sounds not quite as good as those in the app - Latency of voices is an issue with my Kindle Fire rendering the app useless for playing the additional voices of the appEven though there is a issue with latency of the voices in the app on the Kindle, if you use the built-in sounds with learning the songs in the app, the app works fine with the Kindle.Overall, I am very satisfied with the purchase. At this point in my life, I don't plan on becoming a professional or semi-professional horn player. This instrument allows me to enjoy another facet of my hobby (music).I hope this review helps others.Enjoy making music on this or any other instrument. To steal a phrase from a friend: "It's not what you play. It's not how you play. It's the fact that you're playing that counts."

There is not a clear distinction in sound. It’s more like a toy.

I've struggled for decades to find an instrument I could play as an adult learner (57 yo female). I've tried everything from piano to ukulele to guitar to flute and always hit a wall in my learning. This aerophone mini, however, is the one I've been waiting for. It's easy to begin playing songs quickly. The fingering is simple and the keys are ergonomic. And you can really be expressive with it. It's portable, you can play without anyone hearing, it has everything going for it. I almost didn't buy the mini due to some of the negative reviews, but I'm glad I wasn't swayed by them. As someone who just wants to play in my living room, the aerophone mini is perfect for me.