Most coverage of MPE controllers focuses on what's new: firmware updates, fresh hardware, plugin compatibility. Less visible, but arguably more important for the format's long-term future, is what's happening in music schools — where a generation of students is learning to treat expressive controllers as instruments to be practiced, not just interesting MIDI accessories.
A Dedicated Course for Expressive Performance
At Berklee College of Music, the Expressive Control Lab is built specifically around this idea. The course description frames its goal plainly: exploring strategies for creating expressive instrumental performances using electronic instruments, with students working through pedals, ribbons, knobs, sliders, wheels, and aftertouch to control musical parameters like pitch bend, vibrato, tremolo, dynamics, and timbral change.
MPE controllers sit at the center of the curriculum. Students work directly with instruments such as the Roli Seaboard Rise and the Roger Linn Design LinnStrument, alongside more conventional MIDI controllers, in both solo and ensemble settings. Berklee's academic technology facilities list a LinnStrument 128 and multiple Seaboard Rise units as standing lab equipment, meaning students can access the instruments outside of scheduled class time rather than only during a single supervised session.
Treating the Controller-to-Synth Relationship as a Skill
What distinguishes this kind of coursework from a typical gear tutorial is the emphasis on the relationship between controller and instrument — how a given synthesizer's modulation routing responds to a player's specific gestures, and how to shape that relationship intentionally rather than accepting default mappings. That's a genuinely different skill from learning to operate a piece of gear, closer to how a string player studies bowing technique in relation to a specific instrument's response.
Berklee also runs shorter-form workshops built around the same idea, including sessions on expressive performance with MPE and the Seaboard Rise as part of its broader electronic music production and sound design offerings, giving students without room for a full semester-long lab a lower-commitment entry point into expressive controller technique.
Why This Matters Beyond One School
MPE has historically been adopted from the production side first — sound designers and producers reaching for a Seaboard or Osmose to get more nuance out of a patch during a session. Formal performance pedagogy is a slower, later development, and it matters for a specific reason: it produces players who can improvise fluently on these instruments in real time, not just program expressive automation after the fact. That's the same maturation path older instruments went through, and it tends to expand what an instrument category is capable of in the hands of people who've spent years, not weeks, with it.
It's also a signal to instrument manufacturers about where sustained demand is likely to come from. A cohort of conservatory-trained musicians who've built real technique on MPE hardware represents a very different, and probably more durable, customer base than a wave of curiosity-driven buyers responding to a single viral demo video.
What Self-Taught Players Can Take From It
Not everyone interested in expressive controllers has access to a conservatory lab, but the structure Berklee uses is easy enough to borrow. The course treats gesture and modulation routing as something to be practiced deliberately on a single instrument over time, rather than something to configure once via a preset patch and leave alone. Spending a semester's worth of sessions on just a handful of core techniques — controlled vibrato through side-to-side pressure, dynamic filter movement through strike force, clean glissando across a slide-capable surface — mirrors how a wind or string player builds technique, and it transfers well to independent practice with any MPE controller, from a budget Joué Play up to a full-size Continuum.
For students or self-taught players outside a formal program, Berklee's course description and equipment list are a useful reference point for what a serious, structured approach to learning expressive controllers actually looks like — starting with an instrument and enough time on it to develop real technique, rather than a settings menu to configure once and forget. As more schools follow Berklee's lead, expect the gap between "owns an MPE controller" and "can genuinely perform on one" to keep narrowing.