Total control: how the latest MPE, touch and gesture controllers could revolutionize your music production

Expressive E’s Touché is a fantastic means of taking your first steps into multi-dimensional control. We’ve recently acquired one and we’re going to explore how we can use it to augment and enhance our performance. 

Firstly, we’ll need Lié, the accompanying software which enables Touché to interface with our DAW. Downloading via the Expressive E website, we activate the software and allow it to scan our VST plugins.

While Lié has many intriguing standalone patches on which to test out the Touché, what we really want to do is integrate it into our existing workflow. Opening our DAW (Logic) we can add Lié as a plugin. 

Within the Lié shell we can open up a sub plugin instrument and map parameters to our Touché. We’re going to use one of our favourite sound design synths, Absynth 5.

Using Lié’s Speedmapping tool – which appears atop the sub-plug-in’s window – you can lock parameters in your soft synth to one of the Touché’s 8 slots, (simply by clicking on both of them at the same time) These correspond with movement on the Touché.

Assigning effect levels, oscillators, LFO and more interesting sound morphing parameters to our up, down, left and right areas of the Touché, interesting intermediate sound states can be constructed, and gradually explored. 

While hard pressing each area of the Touché will instantly trigger a selected parameter, the smooth surface of the central pedal allows you to gracefully glide between states, and intermingle them in interesting ways. 

Using the Sensitivity Curve Editor, we can change the sensitivity of our Touché, and adjust how it will affect the movement of each slots’ parameter based on our expression, via a horizontal and vertical axis.

Adjusting the unit’s physical internal slider can add precision (by moving it to the top) or sliding down to allow for a looser quality. Touché is a graceful road into exploring multi-dimensionality.