KAUSTHUB RAVI & SIVANESH NATARAJAN
TOUCHÉ EXPRESSIVE E
Hardware Controller
The Expressive E Touche gives you a brand new way to
physicallyi, intuitively interact with and control your
software and hardware instruments adding an entirely
new dimension to your perfor-mance. At the outset,
this is one expensive controller to add to your synths
and programming workflow. Is it worth it though?
The Touche Expressive E is a small rectangular unit
about the length of a shoe box. The soft touch finish along
with a wooden touch surface on top gives the whole thing
quite a premium feel. Four independent sensors detect
these vertical and lateral movements. A slider concealed
under the control surface sets the physical ‘sensitivity’
of the lateral movements via a pair of steel springs.
Expressive E call these vertical and horizontal motions
‘Shiftings’ and, since the wooden control surface is
suspended at either end, a Top Shifting describes a tilt down
at its far end and a Bottom Shifting a tilt at the near end.
Depending on where and how hard you press it along its
length, you can produce either subtle or extreme Shiftings
of either type. A Left or Right Shifting moves the wooden
surface in the horizontal plane, and a combination of the
two types of shifting produces that which you’d expect.
The unit can be operated as a standalone unit with hardware
instruments via MIDI/CV. Or in Slave mode where the
functionality is in the control of their own VST/AU plugin
called Lie. Lié not only al-lows you to create Touché
hardware presets for any external MIDI or CV controllable
hardware, but can also host any VST instrument plug-in,
enabling you to create and save Touché presets for the
parameter controls available for that VST instrument.
It must be noted that the sounds contained within the Lie
software sound pretty great and of really good quality.
More importantly, it's insanely fun to play around with. We
haven't had this much fun testing something in a long time.
The parameters are mapped quite cleverly to the functions
of the controller to make it extremely intuitive to use. The
two buttons on the unit help you cycle through the presets
and the knob allows you to set the sensitivity in terms of
the velocity. Lié v1.2 also in-cludes 50 templates covering
a selection of synths and other hardware from Arturia,
Behringer, Dave Smith Instruments, Elektron, Hypersynth,
Korg, Kurzweil, Meeblip, MFB, Moog, Nord, Nova-tion, Oto
Machines, Roland, Strymon, Studio Electronics, Waldorf
and Yamaha. You can also download a file of instrument-
specific presets from the Expressive E web site, although not
every unit with a template is covered at the present time.
We tested the unit with a Waldorf Blofeld desktop synth. The
hardware preset comes with mapping for specific patches on
the Blofeld. The rest can be manually mapped. The manual
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Score Magazine
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mapping can get quite tedious and difficult to figure out
with the endless list of options for each control parameter.
We also tested it with various VST synths including
synths from Arturia, Native instruments, Spire and U-He.
It works remarkably well once you’ve got it all setup. If a
parameter is available to be controlled, it can be mapped
to the Touché, enabling you to create control layouts and
to ‘play’ them in a very intuitive and musically satisfying
manner. Stacking a number of parameters on one Shifting
gives you the possibility of creating subtle combinations of
concurrent changes with the smallest of hand movements
or of hitting huge crescendos with a bit more force.
In conclusion, It is an extremely fun piece of gear to have
especially if you've got a nice collection of VSTs or Synths
that map to the unit. It completely changes the way you
interact with your sounds and adds a new three-dimensional
approach to playing them. Setup can be tricky and in our
experience, the software was quite buggy at times. But
that's something that can easily be fixed with the large
number of updates that the company continually puts out.