"New" MPE-enabled sounds

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MPE-sounds are an important development, so I have been exploring controllers, hardware synths, software VST's with this in mind.

- Flow - massive additive synthesis could be a really interesting development ... but will take some learning at first impressions.
- Cypher 2 - I got on the back of some Roli Blocks and seems to have potential ... a new expansion pack (Textured Waves) seems to have presets (ideas) for really interesting sounds ... and fits with my impression that Roli can be really good for playing complexly-developing ambient/pad sounds, but under my hands so far is soggy for faster chords and melodic stuff where the Linnstrument is king. The VST sounds good though.
- Arche - from Expressive-E, the makers of the Touche block, a collection of physically modelled bowed stringed instruments ... I wonder if it's a new alternative to the SWAM instruments ... certainly cheaper ...

Things to explore ... I'd be interested in others experience of these ... and what have I missed?

Cheers Toby

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Toby,

If you haven't already, check out UVI's Falcon: https://www.uvi.net/falcon.html

It is a beast with a fairly decent learning curve, but is MPE-ready and allows users the ability to create their own MPE sounds, as well as, tweak some existing presets into MPE-enabled.

I would not recommend it if you're just looking for a preset player. However, if you want to dig into sound design, there are very few pieces of software I'd recommend more.
Duality without regard to physicality

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TobyB, could you elaborate on Flow? I could not find any MPE capable synth with that name...
Equator is a perfect companion for the LinnStrument, as in the main window you can adjust the curves for all 5 dimensions of expression and it comes with a lot of 5D sounds ready to play...
All Madronalabs synths are a joy as well...

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I think TobyB is referring to Waves Flow Motion:

https://www.waves.com/plugins/flow-motion-fm-synth

+1 on the Madrona Labs stuff.

u-he, Synthmaster, HALion 6, SoftTube, FXPansion and NI's Reaktor are all golden as well
Duality without regard to physicality

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I also wonder which vsts support vst3 expressions. The Steinberg stuff does, but there must be more than that. With vst3 expressions I can play MPE in Bitwig directly... There is not much information about it out there, maybe because beside Cubase, Nuendo and Bitwig I don‘t know of hosts who implement it fully...

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Hi

Flow that I was mentioning is an additive synth project I discovered, I think, through Synthtopia.
https://github.com/eclab/flow
Looks challenging (for me anyhow!) ... but having got into synths from background reading eventually of books like Designing Sound, or Creating Sounds From Scratch ... additive stuff that was pie-in-the-sky theory in the days where 2 or even 3 hardware oscillators was quite a thing ... but with a software model that offers up to 16 voices of polyphony, each capable of having 256 defined partials ... Loom 2 on steroids?
Anyhow, it has MPE built in as standard according to it's manual p9 (https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/flow/flow.pdf), although the patches I've briefly tried haven't obviously had this built in ... but, something to explore ... and impressed that MPE was just apparently a given when it's being designed, not a later add-on, is encouraging for the future?

UVI Falcon ... something else to explore ... having got an Expressive E Touche it came with an offer I couldn't resist ... and there are a whole lot of 5D presets to reverse-engineer and understand ... favourite VST's being superseded? Will "big names" like NI see (feel?) the wind is blowing and add this, for instance to Massive X?

I think Bitwig might be replacing Live, bur Reaper too ...

So much to learn!

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Thanks for the link to Flow. Interesting concept... Maybe in the upcoming Grid of Bitwig 3 its possible to patch something together like that...
It seams the bigger the name the lesser they get what MPE offers. But maybe that is a good thing, its better the small innovative developers get your GAS money than the big ones... It saved me some uneccessary investment following the rule that a synth has to support MPE... Already there are more toys around than I can deeply explore in a life time...

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I also use falcon, I love it. At the moment I feel that falcon is my favorite synth. To be fair the addon libraries often have their own scripts that clash with the mpe script so you end up programming your own patches most of the time. Falcon is vast, if you master programming it you will want for very few additional sounds. At the moment I'm trying to focus on mastering the linnstrument instead but synths are seductive.

I recently bought diva and repro, both u-he plugins currently on sale via native instruments, they are lovely sounding instruments. Normally I don't appreciate vintage emulations but they were too good a deal to pass up.

I have a yamaha montage too, not mpe per se but 16 part multi timbral. There is a program called camelot pro that automates the mpe setup of several popular multi timbral instruments by loading up a single part into all channels and taking care of the midi channel routing for you. I don't think the linnstrument site mentions montage in the sounds list but I've enjoyed some pretty nice noises with it. To be fair, I did crash it once or twice, likely due to too much midi.

I"m curious about the steinberg plugins, the absolute plugin collection released an update at namm this year and cubase 10 added more mpe support recently. Does anyone have the absolute collection? What are your opinions on it?

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UnWordly, Yep, Falcon is a beast! HALion 6 by Steinberg is in a similar vein and similarly worth it. It's a bit easier to dive deep into than Falcon, but, imho, equally as powerful.

The LinnStrument has had me revisiting Alchemy the past several days. I've always liked it, but man, I really like it coupled with LinnStrument.
Duality without regard to physicality

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An update is now out for Serum that brings MPE support to that synth too. I'm quite fond of using MPE to adjust wavetable positions, havent had time to craft anything much more complicated than that yet.

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Steve,

Thanks for the update. I was hoping Duda wouldn't keep us expressionists waiting to long in the wings. Serum is nifty and it is good to have multiple options.
Duality without regard to physicality

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Arche doesn't support MPE (neither does their Touche controller). Also, while the basic timbre is nice, articulations sound very digital and not very good---even their own demo tracks sound awful compared to SWAM.

https://expressivee.happyfox.com/kb/search/?q=mpe

As far as Blocks go---Lightpad M is okay, not always consistent in terms of sounds produced by particular touches, but Seaboard Block is great in terms of responsiveness (though you may need to practice more and experiment a bit more...).

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