Joué Play | 4-in-1 Portable Digital Instrument, with Powerful and Easy-to-use Musical App Included - Plug & Play Music

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Stray outside the mainstream of MIDI controller products and you’ll often find innovations from smaller companies. I was strangely able to fiddle with the exact placement of my fingers to get the full aftertouch values while in the same “general” horizontal plane so I think there are 8 horizontal strips, with even and odd strips being shared for the 4 horizontal “areas. The manual sensibly warns against attempting to use this second port for anything other than the editor.

Adjust the tempo of your song, or the volume of each track directly from the app or go even further by experimenting with in-app effects that can be controlled on your pads. 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. Your Joue Play evolves with you and leads you through your transition to professional music production softwares to let your creativity express itself fully. Combine all controllers into one device that you'll always have at hand on the go, in the studio or on stage.The keys pad is particularly interesting because it lets you press and hold a note, then run up and down the other keys to create glides, sweeps and other cool effects. This means holding two notes will reduce the first pressed note greatly, while the second note will be roughly 1/3 its magnitude. With an increasing number of DAWs and instruments supporting MPE, which lets you control more than the standard MIDI controllers allow, it’s one of the few hardware controllers that can do it, and also one of the most affordable. I was pleasantly surprised to note that MPE glide between keys arrived at the correct pitch regardless of the selected scale. Capture your musical ideas wherever you are with Joué Play and complete your creation in your DAW with Audio STEMS and MIDI export.

Up to eight tracks can be used per project, and users can set tempo, loop length, and instrument tuning (the guitar pad offers alternative tunings like drop C). I hate it when companies dont try to sort their firmware, all that effort on product development and then they mess up in some other ways! The two keyboard pads have a long strip, and the drum and guitar pads have a larger XY area; these are all used for modifying sounds or effects in real-time. At one end is a single USB-C port that carries power to the unit and data from it, and in the box you get USB-C and USB-A cables as well as a USB-C to Lightning, covering pretty much all computers, tablets and smartphones.Pressure-sensitive, MPE-capable, configurable multi-touch MIDI controllers seem to be like buses: you wait ages then two come along (almost) at once. The Pro option turns the Joué Play into an expressive and modular MPE MIDI controller that reacts like a real instrument. Play does function as a general MIDI controller so you can hook it up to anything – its use of USB rather than routing via a MIDI interface is a bonus, as is its ultra-portability.

So I decided to accept that its useless for pressure, and to just use it in situations where I want to focus on pitch and Y gestures. Each fader has a small detent at each end, acting as a convenient 'dead zone' at each extreme of travel, and there's also a very slight centre ridge. Joué wants Play to be simpler than other MIDI controllers, so you don’t get visual access to any specific parameters – it’s a case of playing with the pads and seeing what changes. I haven’t plugged my Joué in in a while, but last time I checked, there was no way to get any kind of sensor data out of it without one or more of the officially recognised overlays covering its surface.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. Great care has been taken to ensure accuracy in the preparation of this article but neither Sound On Sound Limited nor the publishers can be held responsible for its contents. The piano notes are just about big enough for accurate playing and the key and drum pads a bit easier. If the range was a little wider I might be able to know for sure, but I don’t have enough dexterity yet to be certain of my input.

I have two versions, one which takes MPE mode data from Joue and keeps it as MPE, just converting CC74 into the appropriate midi channels channel aftertouch.

I suppose the easiest thing to do is use the X-Y pads as a base configuration and then map the input within a script. And when both fingers apply maximum pressure, the aftertouch values for each finger end up being about half the maximum aftertouch value. Available as direct download in the Joue Play App, Artist Packs invite you to explore the musical worlds of renowned artists with 8 new Signature instruments to add to your library to enrich your creations. Since then I didn’t have the opportunity to try the new models that have supposedly a better touch sensitivity. The factory settings of the modules put them on distinct MIDI channels, while the MIDI controller numbers generally go from 1 upwards, but these settings are all editable.