A well-stocked MPE controller is only half the story — the sound underneath has to be built to listen to it. That's the pitch behind MPE Expressions Vol. 2, a new preset pack for Arturia Pigments 7 from UK sound designer Marc Barnes, released through Marc Barnes Sounds.
What's in the pack
The pack ships 32 patches, each built around per-note pressure, glide and macro modulation rather than static filter sweeps. Barnes designed the patches on an Expressive E Osmose, routing continuous pressure into timbral macros and per-note pitch into glide and detune amounts — the kind of layered modulation a fixed-velocity patch can't reach. Pigments' synthesis engine (wavetable, virtual analog, sampling and granular, all in one signal path) gives the presets somewhere to put that data: pressure can simultaneously open a filter, blend two oscillator types and add drive, all from a single continuous gesture per note.
Built for more than one controller
Vol. 2 is explicit about not being an Osmose exclusive. The patches also respond to the Korg KeyStage's poly aftertouch and to Ableton Push 3's per-pad pressure and slide, and for players without an MPE controller at all, key parameters fall back onto the mod wheel so the sounds stay usable — just without the per-note independence that makes them interesting in the first place. That's a sensible design choice: MPE preset packs live or die on whether they degrade gracefully for the much larger audience still playing on a standard keyboard.
Why this release matters beyond the pack itself
Two things about this release are worth noting for anyone following the MPE ecosystem rather than just Pigments users specifically.
First, it's a second volume, following a first pack that shipped back in January 2026. A sound designer returning to build on a series is a small but real signal that there's a sustainable audience buying MPE-specific content — not just controllers and plugins, but the sound-design layer that sits on top of them, the same way preset banks have long supported ordinary synths.
Second, the release's own marketing leans on a specific moment in the controller market: Expressive E shipped the lower-cost Osmose CE — the Ctrl-e edition that drops the built-in synth engine and sells around $999 — earlier this year, and gearnews.com's coverage of the pack explicitly frames the release as good news for anyone who "recently invested" in that hardware. Preset content arriving alongside a cheaper on-ramp to a flagship controller is exactly the kind of ecosystem move that decides whether a controller stays a niche purchase or becomes something plugin developers and sound designers build around by default.
The bigger pattern
None of this is unique to Pigments. As more synths ship with real MPE support baked in — rather than aftertouch bolted on as an afterthought — the preset economy around them is starting to look like the one that's existed around ordinary synths for two decades: a controller ships, a flagship plugin adds proper support, and independent sound designers follow with content actually built for the gesture data rather than just tolerating it. Pigments has been a fairly consistent target for that kind of content since it added MPE input, and Vol. 2 suggests that's continuing rather than tapering off.
For players already on an MPE controller, the pack is worth an audition specifically because it was built the way MPE patches should be: designed on the hardware, with pressure and glide doing real modulation work, rather than an ordinary preset with MPE support checked as a box afterward.