I hardly used mine once I discovered that the pressure sensors were no good at all for polyphonic expression - the pressure applied by each finger interfered very badly with eachother, making a complete mockery of that side of things. The J-App provides you with tutorials and a library of covers updated every month to interpret or remix.

And then at some point I think they deleted their old forum where this communication happened, so I dont even have reference to that bit of history now. Artist sound packs are available for a small fee but each pad comes with its own set of around ten instruments.You can select a sound in the app and load multiple sounds per project, which appear in a circular arrangement. The effect zones on each of the Play Pads allow you to modify the sound to add the little touch that will make the difference in your creation.

The package includes the Play Board, pads, and a USB C-to-C cable, with adapters for USB A and Lightning (power users might appreciate the optional USB C-to-MIDI cable). The others can be assigned a variety of MIDI messages, or act as toggles for other modes like sustain and vibrato.

The really tricky thing about this is if there are two colliding notes, and one free note, you have to avoid applying that function to the free note somehow. I found the fretboard's pitch modulation harder to control than on the keyboards; there's no MPE glide facility, and you have to tweak the vibrato and bending controls by ear. I’m already using my own dodgy midi processing script with this device at the moment, because I wanted to convert the MPE Y CC74 messages into aftertouch messages for use with certain hardware synths. What is even more annoying is pressing hard will completely blow out the other notes aftertouch data, so with each note, you have to press lighter and lighter to not blow out their output. In both projects, each instrument track is set up to host multiple instruments allowing selection by MIDI controller (using Chain Select in Live, or the X/Y instrument mixing container in Bitwig): you could create a controller mapping for this selection according to taste.

The ridges have slight bumps at what would be minimum, maximum and centre locations for conventional potentiometers — useful for operation without looking at your hands, and hitting the centre location (MIDI value 64) was surprisingly easy. The app allows you to add multiple parts of different bar lengths and quantise or delete the recordings, though not edit in any greater depth than that. Joué have confirmed that this is a bug which will be addressed, so that channel aftertouch will be output smoothly regardless of the number of pads being pressed. The editor manages presets (left-hand panel), and allows MIDI configuration on a preset-by-preset basis (right-hand panel). Again there's no indication of which modes are active, so it might have made more sense to have a way to group the buttons into on/off pairs instead.And when both fingers apply maximum pressure, the aftertouch values for each finger end up being about half the maximum aftertouch value. Pressure-sensitive, MPE-capable, configurable multi-touch MIDI controllers seem to be like buses: you wait ages then two come along (almost) at once. Vibrato response seemed a little temperamental, needing a bit of left-right movement before kicking in, but glissando and glide worked well enough when configured properly. I’ve been working on the processing side of things, but it’s possible to cut out a usable projection surface, stick a NTAG213 RFID chip on the back, and copy the map data of one of the pads into it for an easy cludge. Yes, I checked and there are effectively 4 horizontal strips and 12+ vertical strips that record aftertouch, based on the dimensions of the matrix pad.

Using the record button directly on your Joué Play device, start recording your melody, chord or rythm with your fingertips. I have dug mine out again recently though, because its absolutely my favourite controller for MPE Y gestures.

I’ve been running the board the the RPI on a 5000mah battery for the last 3 hours without the charge dropping so this seems like a great thing to DIY. The pads use RFID to communicate with the board, and the available layouts are: piano (25-key piano), drum pad (16 drum pads with x-y area), keys (17-key alternative style keyboard with expression strip), and guitar (representing the first seven frets on a guitar neck).