Review: Expressive Touché SE 'the future of creative producing'

We are getting more interesting product launches over from France. There seems to be quite some development from talented product developers there. This week we had a closer look at the Expressivee Touché SE. Touché is a product from Expressivee; a manufacturer of next-generation musical instruments.

Touché is giving musicians the opportunity to expand their current software or hardware with new touch functionalities. Intuitively tap, push and slide on the touchpad on the top of the device.

Expressivee has launched two hardware products so far: 

- Expressivee Touché

The Touché is the more expensive model of Expressivee. This is because the Touché can be connected to hardware synths with MIDI inputs/outputs, CV outputs or connect to a digital synth via USB. The Touché has an internal memory card and can be used as standalone.

- Expressivee Touché SE

The Touché SE (Software Ecosystem) is specially built for producers that work ‘in the box’ and like to link their software instead of hardware to the Touché SE. This comes at half the price of it’s more expensive brother, the Touché. The Touché SE is USB only and has to be connected via a computer. Touché SE does not feature physical MIDI In/Out and CV Output ports on the rear, it has a USB Type B port only, but it can be used to create MIDI CC data within a DAW, which could then, in turn, be output to hardware synthesizers via third-party MIDI or CV interfaces.

Two products but the same essence. The main differences can be seen in the Touché SE being geared towards producers that mainly work with software, compared to the hardware functionalities that the Touché offers.

Touché SE features black polycarbonate touch-plate ‘skin’, versus the Mahogany-material ‘skin’ of the Touché. Besides that, it features the exact same software-side capabilities and includes the same software bundle.

The Touché SE

It is a USB Type B power hardware device and is MIDI class compliant. The Touché SE has a couple of stylish developed buttons. The left and right button to go to the next or previous pre-sets. Turn the knob to decrease or increase the sensitivity of both top and bottom shiftings.

Under the hood, there are some functions allow the user to increase or decrease the stiffness of both left and right shifting’s. See the picture below for a look under the top layer of the Expressivee.

Long press the encored to put the Expressivee in sleep mode and a short clip to freeze the data and click again to unfreeze.

The Touché models are patented hardware, to protect their great idea of course! You can start right away with their own, user friendly, library of sounds. Also, give it a try with your current synths. They currently have 200 pre-made mappings with some of the most popular synths, giving new users the ability to immediately start to learn.

Expressivee Lié software

Lié control software is available as standalone, VST and AU. At Inside Audio, we’ve mainly tried the standalone – and it’s great! The design is very minimalistic which makes it easy to work with. Within the standalone version, you can select your own synth presets, such as a Spire VST,  and assign the knobs to different parameters and get creative.

If you want to get more creative between productions, this is a great and inspirational device to utilize.

Within Lié, you can use 8 parameters at the same time and open your current synths very easily. Expressivee has also libraries on their site where more sounds are available for purchase.

Overall

We must say that we are amazed by the way the Touché SE works. It is very easy to use and it extends your creative mind instantly! To get skilled with it, the Touché SE should be seen as an instrument. You need to learn to play it and it has learning curve. We love products like this that allow for way more possibilities with the accessible hardware. It keeps the dynamic when producing music with a computer.

Well done Expressivee and we can’t wait to see what the future will bring us!