I think if you want something that conveys expression more readily than a slider or you don't like breath controllers (or want something that behaves differently if you do), it's worth the money. So it does feel like playing some oddball instrument with the Touché under one hand and a keyboard under the other, and readily lends itself to organic sounds. It encourages me (at least) to use gestures that I wouldn't normally use with other controllers: it's really good for "hitting" things as well as as bowing-type gestures. But it feels like someone spent a lot of time with prototypes to come up with a decent balance of size, weight and responsiveness. I say surprising because it's a pretty simple piece of gear and doesn't even give you four independent degrees of freedom (because obviously you can't move it left and right at the same time and the forward/backward motion involves some degree of linkage). The Touché is surprisingly good at teasing out expression. Tl dr - some interesting ideas and you can get organic sounds out of it easily but a bit of a miss given what else is out there and that the controller integration is more workable than seamless.
#Expressive e touche full#
In fact, I'm seriously considering building some of the architecture of Noisy into some Absynth presets as most of the necessary plumbing seems to be in place in that venerable synth other than the ability to set rise and fall lag independently and the lack of a second full synth layer (though hardly a showstopper in DAWs that let you stack instruments easily). My feeling, though not fully tested, is that Brian Clevinger's Plasmonic has a lot more potential with controllers like the Touché though you have to do a bit more custom mapping yourself. The other issue is the comparative lack of flexibility in the synth engine. But I'm not confident it's actually there. Part of the problem here is that there is a long, inscrutable list of parameters in the MIDI Learn page so it might well be there - I just haven't found it yet. I can map the amounts or the LFO amplitude but not things that control the sound directly. I can't for the life of me find a way to map the X and Y directions in the oscillator panel (which controls the waveform harmonics) to different CCs. I feel it could really do with a granulator like the Absynth Aetheriser and a phase distortion module or waveshaper like, er, Absynth again rather than the basic distortion you get in Noisy. The FX control has potential but it's a slightly odd selection. And you can see it in the presets, which have a samey quality to them because the up and down axes are typically simply mapped to the two synth layers expression channels and the left and right are mapped to effects control. This is the kind of thing that makes breath controllers far easier to use as you don't have to be as precise with the blowing.īut, it seems weird to couple a four-axis expression controller to a synth like this. You can hit the Touché, for example, and let it go and the expression control will rise and fall back to zero based on the lag settings. What it gives you on this is good, in that you have separate rise and fall lag parameters for expression, which makes it easier to play different kinds of instrument simulations. The second bit of bad news is that, bizarrely, it's really only set up to have one primary expression control channel. The bad news is that it is a fairly limited architecture other than the fact you can layer up about six oscillator/resonator combinations. The resonators and combs get you into physical-modelling territory easily enough. The subtractive synth and filter section sounds convincing enough. The Touché is really good for scraping and bouncing hammer-type gestures that are tough to pull off on a keyboard or a pad surface.
#Expressive e touche generator#
The good news on the sound generator side is that, in combination with something like a Touché, it sounds pretty alive. Though this makes it easy to audition different patches, for an instrument like this, I think you really want to be able to save CC setups as presets themselves as there will be situations where you want to remap them for different kinds of instruments.
![expressive e touche expressive e touche](https://thumbs.static-thomann.de/thumb/thumb356x/pics/atg/atgthumb/intlink/tspreview/67830_593757.jpg)
The bad news is that the controller settings seem to be global. The integration with the Touché isn't very deep other than the default CCs are mapped to it. Though the setup page is called MIDI Learn, it doesn't force you to use MIDI learn: you can just pick the CC numbers from a menu, so you don't have the issue of learning the wrong CC just because you breathed into a controller or wobbled a parameter at the wrong moment.
![expressive e touche expressive e touche](https://lareclame-scanbook.s3.amazonaws.com/touche11497888840-realisation-fancybox.jpg)
The good news for anyone without a Touché is that it plays nice with other controllers. Overall, so far it's a bit of a good news/bad news proposition. I've tried it with a Touché SE and a TEC breath/bite/tilt controller. I've got it and haven't had a chance to dig into it deeply yet, so there may be things I've missed that will change my opinion.