Bela Trails Is Shipping: Four Channels of Recorded Touch Gesture for Eurorack and MIDI

Expressive control usually means playing gestures in real time. Bela's new Trails module asks a different question: what if you could record a gesture, keep it, and then have it play back — polyphonically, alongside three others?

Trails is now shipping, having been announced at Superbooth 2025 and opened for pre-order earlier this year. It's the four-channel evolution of Bela's well-liked Gliss touch controller module, and it's one of the more thoughtful pieces of expressive hardware to appear this year.

What It Does

Trails is a polyphonic touch recorder. Its face is a multi-colour capacitive touch surface roughly 3.5" square, and it captures your finger movement across that surface in two dimensions.

Each of the four independent channels records up to 40 seconds of movement, and each outputs X and Y control voltage plus a gate. That combination is the interesting part. A single recorded gesture can simultaneously drive a melody (X), a timbral parameter (Y) and a rhythmic event (gate) — meaning one physical movement produces pitch, modulation and timing information at once, exactly the way a note on an expressive instrument carries several dimensions at the same time.

With four lanes running independently, you can layer gestures against each other: a slow drifting Y curve under a fast rhythmic X sweep, or four separate melodic lines each carrying their own contour.

CV and MIDI

Trails outputs both control voltage and MIDI, which is what lifts it out of the purely modular category. In a Eurorack case it drives oscillators, filters and envelopes directly. Over MIDI it can address hardware synths and plugins, which means the recorded gestures are available to your DAW as well as to your rack.

Bela has not, at time of writing, published details of MPE-specific channel behaviour, so we'd point anyone buying it specifically for MPE duty at the official product page and the manual before ordering. What is clearly documented is per-channel independence with X, Y and gate — the raw material of per-note expression, whether or not it's formatted as MPE on the wire.

Why Recorded Gesture Matters

There's a gap in most expressive setups that Trails sits neatly inside.

Playing MPE live gives you nuance but no repeatability. Drawing automation in a DAW gives you repeatability but rarely feels human — hand-drawn curves are recognisably hand-drawn, and quantised ones are recognisably quantised. Recording an actual finger movement and looping it gives you both: the micro-irregularity of a real gesture, playing back reliably, at whatever speed you want.

That's especially useful for the things MPE players tend to struggle to notate. Slow timbral drift across a pad. A vibrato that speeds up unevenly. The particular shape of a slide that you got right once and can't reproduce. Trails captures those and hands them back as CV or MIDI.

It also solves a physical problem: you only have ten fingers, and on a single expressive surface you can only be in one place at a time. Four recorded lanes let a solo performer sustain more simultaneous expressive movement than they could physically play.

Availability

Trails entered production earlier in 2026 and is available now through Bela and its dealer network, including Perfect Circuit, Elevator Sound and Ctrl-Mod. Pricing varies by region and retailer, so check current listings.

The Bigger Picture

Bela has spent years building tools for people who want physical interaction to feel like an instrument rather than like a control panel, and Trails fits that lineage. It's a reminder that expressive control isn't only a keyboard problem — the same ideas that make MPE compelling on a Seaboard or a Continuum apply just as well to a touch surface bolted into a modular case.

For anyone whose expressive rig currently stops at the edge of the DAW, this is a small module that meaningfully extends where those gestures can go.