One of the quiet frustrations of owning an MPE controller is that the instrument you buy and the sound you play are made by different companies who never spoke to each other. You get a beautiful touch surface and a synth that treats your pressure data as a generic CC. Embodme has taken the obvious step and built the missing half: Erae Sound, a synthesizer designed around its own controller — but usable with any MPE hardware.
A synth that ships with layouts, not just patches
The Erae 2 is a fully configurable pressure-sensitive touch surface. Nothing on it is fixed: you decide where notes live, where the pads are, where the faders go. That flexibility is the product's strength and also its tax — every new sound is a mapping session before it is a musical one.
Erae Sound's answer is that each of its 101 presets carries its own surface layout. Load a patch called Digital Harp and the surface becomes a harp. Load Analog Keys and it becomes a keyboard. Load Retro and the geometry changes again. Embodme's framing is that these are instruments rather than presets, and it is not pure marketing — a physical modeling pluck played on a strip laid out for strumming is a different instrument from the same patch played on a keyboard grid, because the layout determines which gestures are natural.
Hardware and software stay in bidirectional sync, so layout-aware modulation sources — XY pads, faders, buttons defined by the current preset — appear dynamically in the plugin rather than needing to be mapped by hand.
The engine underneath
Erae Sound is a virtual-analog synth, not a physical modeling one, which is a slightly surprising choice for an expressive instrument. The specification is solid:
- Two dual-oscillator engines with continuous waveform morphing
- A wavefolder and through-zero FM
- Dual morphing filters
The modulation approach is where it diverges from the norm. There is no modulation matrix and no slot limit. Instead, every knob owns its own ADSR and LFO, with the LFOs running free, tempo-synced or at audio rate, offering waveform morphing and polyphonic behavior with link groups. Polyphonic LFOs matter a great deal on an MPE instrument — a single global LFO smears across all voices and destroys the per-note independence you bought the controller for.
Nine effects round it out — distortion, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, reverb, shimmer, compressor and parametric EQ — across four slots, with per-generator wet sends and every parameter available as a modulation destination.
It works with your controller too
The most important line in the specification is easy to miss: Erae Sound works with any MPE controller. It is a standalone VST3, AU and standalone application, merely optimized for the Erae 2.
Owners of an Osmose, a LinnStrument, a ROLI Seaboard, a Continuum or a Striso board can use it as an ordinary MPE synth plugin. The layout-switching magic does not apply, but the engine, the per-knob modulation and the polyphonic LFOs all do. At $89 as a one-time purchase, that puts it in the same bracket as most dedicated MPE plugins while offering a modulation architecture more generous than several of them.
A free demo is available from Embodme's downloads page, which is the sensible way to check whether the engine suits your playing before committing.
Why controller makers keep writing synths
Erae Sound is part of a clear pattern. Expressive E built Noisy and the Expressive Suite around the Osmose's gesture vocabulary. Haken Audio has always shipped the EaganMatrix with the Continuum. Aodyo pairs the Anyma Phi plugin with its hardware. Embodme has now done the same.
The reason is structural. MPE transmits three continuous dimensions per note, but the specification says nothing about what they should mean. A synth designed without a specific controller in mind must guess, and usually defaults to pitch bend on X, filter cutoff on Y, volume on Z — the safe assignments that make everything playable and nothing exceptional. A synth designed alongside a controller can assume how those dimensions will actually be used and voice presets accordingly.
For players, the takeaway is practical: when a manufacturer releases a synth for its own hardware, its preset library is usually the best available demonstration of what that hardware can do. Even if you own a different controller, those patches are worth studying.
More information: Embodme Erae Sound · Erae 2 controller