8 MPE-enabled orchestral instruments to explore with ROLI Piano and Seaboard
Want to recreate a real orchestra or simulate a soloist? Here are all your best options, all in one place.
You might think MPE is a natural fit for orchestral sounds. Controllers like Seaboard and Piano seem made for exactly the kind of expression you’d expect to hear in a concert hall: perfectly controlled vibratos, seamless switching between staccato and legato parts, perfectly timed swells, and so on.
But it’s not always been easy to find compatible instruments. There are new cutting-edge MPE synths released virtually every week, but truly expressive sampled instruments — typically the technology of choice for these sorts of sounds — are fewer and further between.
Sure, it’s possible to achieve incredible results with little more than a mod wheel or a couple of faders, provided you have a whole lot of time and patience for tweaking MIDI after the fact. But the process is far removed from what most of us would consider creative flow — and getting it even a little bit wrong can consign your music to the sonic uncanny valley.
There is, thankfully, now a growing number of great-sounding MPE alternatives available, so we’ve rounded up our favourites here in one handy list. Be sure to read on to the end for a useful workaround for using more conventional sampled instruments with your MPE controller of choice, too.
Equator2
We’re kicking off the list here with our very own contribution, Equator2. As a synthesizer, rather than a sampled instrument, it’s a bit of an odd one out in this list (though not entirely unique, as we’ll see). Part of what makes Equator2 so special as an instrument, and so useful for orchestral sounds, is that it allows you to freely select six different sound sources, and one or more of these can be sample modules. There’s even support for loading multi-sampled instruments in the SFZ format.
You’ll find some emulations of traditional instruments in Equator2’s built-in library, but if you really want to create orchestral magic with a Seaboard or ROLI Piano (Equator2 works with any MPE or conventional controller, but is designed with our own instruments in mind), check out the Orchestral Ensembles from our Sound Pack store. Choral Ensembles is also worth a look for adding epic vocals, as is Expressive Virtuoso for solo instruments.
Slate + Ash Auras
Boutique Bristol instrument maker Slate + Ash made a splash in the sampled instrument scene with their very first commercial release, Auras. As well as being the company’s debut instrument, Auras holds the distinction of being the first — and for a long while only — MPE-compatible instrument available for Kontakt (more on this below). Auras is largely based around hybrid acoustic and electric sounds, but a good deal of the sources used are traditional, orchestral instruments — particularly strings. It’s well worth a look if you’re inclined towards the darker, more experimental or ambient fringes of orchestral music.
Audio Modelling SWAM
Italian developer Audio Modeling has opted for an unconventional approach to solo and ensemble strings, brass, and woodwinds. Rather than playing back recorded samples of real instruments, the company’s SWAM (Synchronous Waves Acoustic Modeling) instruments are physically modelled instead, effectively creating synthesised simulations of the real thing. While some developers aim to capture all the tiny nuances that make a sample sound “real,” Audio Modeling opts to create that realism through a greater degree of control and expression than would be possible with traditional methods. The trade-off works, as evidenced by the quality of the sounds on offer.
UVI IRCAM Solo Instruments 2
IRCAM is the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris, a research institute dedicated to pushing the boundaries of music and sound. UVI is the French developer behind the Falcon and Workstation instruments in which this collection runs. Together, they’ve created a truly unique set of sampled instruments derived from incredibly detailed samples of conventional and extended playing techniques on solo orchestral instruments. IRCAM Solo Instruments 2’s full MPE support makes it easy to extend your own playing techniques with Seaboard or Piano.
If you already own a Seaboard and would like to experiment in Equator2, you can obtain many of the samples used for this library via signing up for the IRCAM forum — there’s even a smaller set of free samples to get you started.
Arturia Augmented Series
Arturia’s seven Augmented instruments are each designed to merge the acoustic and the electric, sampling and synthesis. The electric sounds “augment” the acoustic ones via a prominent Morph dial in the center of each instrument’s interface, and you also get a set of additional macro controls to add motion and effects to each preset. The MPE implementation gives you the freedom to emulate authentic acoustic performances or stretch them into uncharted territory — try mapping Seaboard’s Slide dimension to the Morph control for some hands-on hybrid sound design.
Expressive E Soliste
The newest inclusion on this list, and the second to be based on physical modelling synthesis, Expressive E’s Soliste is a collection of solo string instruments designed to work with its Osmose keyboard, but it’s equally compatible with other MPE instruments, including our own. If you’ve ever tried to program realistic string samples, you’ll know how difficult it can be to get the pre-recorded bowing to sound correct. Soliste simplifies things by giving you full control of the bow’s movement across the strings, allowing you to navigate even the most complex passages like a real player would.
Ableton x Spitfire Audio
If you’re using Ableton Live Suite, you may already have access to some MPE orchestral instruments you didn’t know about. The Live 11 update introduced official MPE support and also a new suite of built-in sampled instruments created with bespoke samples from Spitfire Audio. If you don’t have the Suite version, all three packs are available for purchase separately. The three packs are String Quartet, Brass Quartet, and Upright Piano (not traditionally a candidate for MPE control — but some fun sounds can be had).
MPE in Kontakt
Native Instruments’ Kontakt has long been the industry-standard sampler for anything orchestral. A growing number of new and proprietary platforms have emerged in recent years, yet it remains untouchable in terms of the sheer variety of instruments available from NI, third-party developers, and independent creators alike.
Recent versions of Kontakt have made some progress towards MPE capability, but this is still largely locked away in scripting, meaning it’s largely limited to a small selection of pre-configured instruments like the above-mentioned Auras, your own creations, or those that give you the ability to edit scripts yourself (and even then, things can get complicated quickly).
For a more foolproof solution, we recommend the method above. The video explains the process for Seaboard, but a similar setup is possible with other instruments. Essentially, the trick is to create a Kontakt “multi” (a single instance of the sampler that hosts multiple instruments inside it) and assign a different MIDI channel to each instrument.
Owing to the way the MPE protocol works, there’s not a great deal more to it — each note is sent on its own MIDI channel and therefore goes to a different instance of the instrument. Provided the instrument you choose has pitch bend enabled and allows you to assign your controllers additional dimensions to useful parameters via MIDI CC, you should be able to play away as if you had full MPE support to begin with.
Create in new dimensions with ROLI
Back in 2013, we brought MPE to the world stage with the original ROLI Seaboard. Today, its most recent successor, Seaboard 2, packs everything we’ve learned since then into our most premium instrument to date. And thanks to increasing MPE support across software and hardware instruments, there’s also a whole lot more you can do with it today than there was back in 2013 — the list mentioned above is just a small selection.
If you’ve perfected your keyboard chops and prefer a more traditional layout, we also now offer the portable Piano M and its forthcoming full-size sibling, ROLI Piano. Both of these combine more conventional-looking and feeling keys with unique technology that allows you to bend the pitch of each one individually. You also get polyphonic aftertouch, RGB backlighting, and much more.
Want to add new dimensions of expression to your existing setup, no matter which keyboard you’re using? Take a look at Airwave, an entirely new kind of controller that allows you to play the air above your keys simply by waving your hands, much like a conductor in front of an orchestra.
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