A new interview with Expressive E published on Attack Magazine offers one of the clearer articulations yet of how the company thinks about MPE's place in a musician's workflow — and it's worth paying attention to, because the framing pushes back directly on a misconception that's followed expressive controllers since the format's early days.
The Core Argument
Speaking with the outlet, Expressive E's Head of Global Sales & Marketing, Roméo Verlet, laid out the thinking behind the recent Osmose CE launch, a controller-only edition of the company's flagship instrument. Asked about what people still misunderstand about MPE, the answer was blunt: many musicians assume expressive controllers exist to replace their current setup — their keyboard, their workflow, their existing instruments — rather than to sit alongside it.
"We're not trying to replace established ways of working, but to extend them, bringing more nuance, more control, and new expressive possibilities," Verlet said. With Osmose CE specifically, the goal wasn't to introduce a new paradigm musicians would need to learn from scratch, but to extend the traditional keyboard playing model that most musicians already have years of muscle memory built around.
Why This Framing Matters
It's a subtle distinction, but it addresses one of the biggest adoption barriers MPE controllers have faced. A player who's spent a decade on a weighted 88-key controller isn't necessarily looking to relearn their instrument — they're looking for more control over the sound they're already making. Positioning a controller as an extension rather than a replacement lowers the stakes considerably: you don't need to abandon your technique to get value from per-note pitch bend, pressure, and slide.
This is also a reasonable explanation for why Osmose CE exists as a product in the first place. Stripping out the onboard sound engine to focus purely on the keybed and gesture vocabulary — while leaning on the Ctrl-e software ecosystem and its growing library of partner presets — only makes sense if the company sees the controller as something that plugs into an existing rig rather than something meant to be a self-contained instrument.
Fitting Into Existing Setups
The interview also touches on how Osmose CE's gesture vocabulary — taps, press-and-tap combinations, subtle shakes layered on top of a traditional-feeling key action — was deliberately designed to feel like an extension of piano technique rather than a departure from it. The keybed is meant to read like a piano first and an expression surface second, which the company frames as a direct response to feedback from keyboardists who wanted MPE's expressive range without giving up the physical feel they'd trained on for years.
That design philosophy lines up with what's happening more broadly across the MPE hardware market in 2026. Manufacturers who once emphasized how different their instruments felt from a standard keyboard have shifted toward emphasizing compatibility and gradual adoption — a recognition that the fastest path to growing the MPE user base runs through existing keyboardists, not around them.
The Bigger Conversation
Verlet's comments also reflect something the wider MPE community has been saying for a while: that the format's biggest hurdle was never really the technology, it was messaging. MPE controllers have been capable of rich, per-note expression for close to a decade, but the framing around them — as specialist tools for a specialist workflow — likely slowed adoption more than any hardware limitation did.
By explicitly positioning Osmose CE, and MPE more broadly, as additive rather than disruptive, Expressive E is making a bet that the next wave of adopters won't be musicians looking to reinvent how they play, but ones looking to add expressive depth to the setup they already trust. Given how much of the recent hardware and software news in the MPE space — from DAW updates to plugin auto-mapping features — has quietly focused on removing friction rather than adding new paradigms, that bet looks well timed.