NEW GEAR

We’ve seen expressive musical keyboards before, but many of them – ROLI’s Seaboard models spring immediately to mind – eschew the standard piano action in favor of something different, requiring players to adapt their technique a fair deal in order to use them.

Osmose, the new Augmented Keyboard Synthesizer from Expressive E – the company behind the impressive Touché controller – is rather different. The result of more than seven years of research, and a collaboration with Haken Audio, this has the look and feel of a standard keyboard, meaning that players should immediately feel comfortable when using it. However, the model also responds to a number of per-note gestures to give you significantly more control.

In fact, you get three dimensions of control on every single key, enabled