Modartt, the Toulouse-based physical modeling house best known for Pianoteq, has released Airteq — and it is not a virtual pipe organ, despite what the marketing images suggest. It is an imaginary instrument built on a real acoustic principle: the plugin generates every sound in real time from a model of air flowing through virtual pipes. No samples, no oscillators. And crucially for anyone reading this site, it supports MPE in full.

Announced on 15 September 2026, Airteq runs as a standalone application and as a VST3, AU, LV2 and AAX plugin on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux and Windows. It costs €99, and you can find the overview on the Modartt site.

Air as the Oscillator

The engine is built on what Modartt calls Dynamic Aerophone Modeling. Rather than starting from a waveform and filtering it, Airteq simulates the whole chain: the generation of pressurized air, its journey toward the pipe, and the way that particular pipe responds to what arrives.

You choose from families of virtual pipes — flutes, reeds and mixtures — each with its own timbral character and, more importantly, its own reaction to changes in airflow. Layered on top of that are three selectable air responses: flute overblow, flute glissando and flute steady pitch. These decide what happens when the air value moves. Overblow jumps registers the way a real flute does when you push too hard. Glissando slides. Steady pitch holds.

Each model gets four associated controls — tune, air, volume and pan — which sounds minimal until you realise that "air" is doing the work of an entire oscillator section.

Why MPE Is the Right Fit Here

Plenty of plugins list MPE as a bullet point. Airteq is one of the smaller category where the synthesis method and the control protocol genuinely want each other.

A physically modeled aerophone has a continuous, non-linear relationship between input energy and output timbre. Blow harder into a real flute and you do not simply get a louder flute — you get a brighter one, then a differently-pitched one, then a squeal. A keyboard with velocity alone flattens that into a series of fixed snapshots.

Per-note pressure is exactly the right controller for an air parameter, and slide (CC74) maps naturally onto pipe selection or air response blending. Because MPE delivers these per note rather than per channel, you can hold a chord in which one voice overblows while the others stay steady — physically impossible on a real instrument, and for that reason one of the more interesting things you can do with a model of one.

Modartt confirms the synth responds to velocity, pitch bend and aftertouch, with full MPE on top.

The Modulation Section Works Differently

Airteq ships with familiar synth furniture — three ADSR envelopes, three LFOs, two macros and gestures — but they are pointed somewhere unusual. Drag-and-drop modulation in Airteq does not open and close a filter. It changes the behaviour of the air itself.

Modartt's own framing is worth repeating: imagine a motionless airflow versus a tornado. Both already sound different before they reach any pipe. Apply that distinction as a modulation destination and you get an instrument where the modulator is not decorating the sound but producing it.

For MPE players, this is the part worth experimenting with first. Routing pressure to an air-turbulence parameter rather than to volume or cutoff is where the instrument stops feeling like a synth preset and starts feeling like something you are physically interacting with.

The Rest of the Package

A convolution reverb with a selection of impulse responses handles space, with the usual dry/wet, size, duration and pre-delay controls. The instrument ships with more than 170 presets, which Modartt describes as designed to demonstrate the engine's range rather than to cover standard orchestral ground.

As always with a new MPE instrument, a factory bank is a starting point rather than a verdict. Presets are voiced by designers making assumptions about your controller, and an airflow model is unusually sensitive to how a keybed reports pressure. Expect to adjust response curves before it feels like yours.

Where It Sits

Airteq lands in a small but growing category: physical modeling instruments that treat MPE as a design premise rather than a compatibility checkbox. It is not a replacement for a sampled organ, and it will not do convincing orchestral winds. What it offers instead is a genuinely unfamiliar sound source — breathy, unstable, capable of sitting still or falling apart — that rewards the kind of continuous gestural control an MPE controller was built to provide.

At €99 with a demo available from Modartt, it is an easy one to evaluate on your own keybed.

Sources: Modartt Airteq overview · Synth Anatomy