Most MPE keyboards spend a surprising amount of their life doing nothing. You play a take, you stop, and then the keyboard sits there while you spend the next hour pushing a mouse around a mixer. Impetus, a new macOS app from Impetus Software announced on 21 September, is built on the observation that the controller you already own has more continuous, high-resolution sensors under your fingers than most dedicated control surfaces do.

What it actually does

Impetus reads the Y-axis slide gesture — the forward-and-back movement MPE keyboards normally use for timbre — and maps it to eight bankable DAW faders. Modifier keys flip those same faders over to pan, solo, mute and record-arm. Transport lives on the keys too: play, stop, record, fast-forward, rewind, loop and punch.

Crucially, none of this happens through a plugin or a control-surface script. Impetus speaks HUI and Mackie Control, the same two protocols that hardware surfaces costing between $500 and $2,000 use. Your DAW simply sees a control surface it already knows how to talk to.

"As soon as I had my ROLI Seaboard sitting in front of me, I saw faders," said Greg Smith of Impetus Software. "I'd always wanted an 8-channel control surface for my home studio, but didn't have the space."

There are three fader response modes — Absolute, Relative and Hybrid — plus a Fine mode for higher resolution when you are chasing a half-decibel. Every control is MIDI-learnable, with conflict detection so two functions never end up fighting over the same key, and layouts are stored as presets alongside read-only factory banks.

The part that isn't about your DAW

The feature that separates Impetus from a hardware surface is the system-wide shortcut and macro engine. Any key can fire any keyboard shortcut, with any modifier combination, or a multi-step macro — and it works in any application, not just your DAW. A hardware HUI box can't do that. This also explains why the developer mentions post-production: Impetus works with any HUI/MC-compatible host, including the Fairlight page in DaVinci Resolve.

Compatibility, and the catch

Impetus needs an MPE keyboard with a genuine slide (Y-axis) surface on the keys. That currently means the 49-key ROLI Seaboard, the 24-key Seaboard M, and the Keith McMillen Instruments K-Board Pro 4. Controllers that produce their timbre dimension another way — a LinnStrument grid, an Expressive E Osmose key action, a Sensel or Embodme touch pad — aren't on the tested list, even though several of them do transmit CC74 happily.

DAW support has been confirmed with Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Cubase, Studio One, Reaper, Ableton Live and Digital Performer. The hard limit is the platform: macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon only. Intel Macs are not supported, and there is no Windows build.

Impetus is $79 as an introductory price until 8 October 2026, after which it moves to $99, with two activations per licence. A 14-day free trial is available, and the app continues to run afterwards in reduced form — factory presets, faders, panning and banking stay live.

Why this is more interesting than it looks

There is a quiet argument buried in this release. For a decade, the pitch for MPE has been expression: per-note pitch bend, pressure and timbre in service of playing. Impetus treats the same hardware as a general-purpose continuous-control surface and asks what else those sensors are good for.

That framing matters for anyone weighing up the cost of an expressive keyboard. A Seaboard that also replaces a control surface, a shortcut pad and a macro box is a different purchase than a Seaboard that only earns its keep when you're tracking. It also hints at a broader pattern: the most useful MPE software of 2026 has not all been synthesis. Tools like MPE Insight for visualisation, MIDI capture utilities and now Impetus are building out the workflow layer around expressive playing rather than the sound layer.

The obvious open question is whether support widens. If Impetus learns to read CC74 from grid and pad controllers rather than requiring a physical slide surface, the addressable hardware list gets considerably longer — and the case for keeping an expressive controller permanently wired in gets stronger with it.

More information: impetus.software · announcement coverage at Rekkerd