Most preset packs are designed to sound impressive in a 30-second demo. You scroll through, find something dramatic, and move on. We knew from the start that Loopa Presets MPE had to be something different — because with MPE instruments, a preset that just sounds good is only half the job.
The other half is how it moves.
Where It Starts: The Controller as the Brief
When we sit down to design a preset for Loopa Presets MPE, we don't open a synth and start tweaking oscillators. We pick up a controller first.
Each MPE controller has a personality. The Osmose has a deeply physical quality — its keys have resistance, aftertouch that builds with pressure, a sense of weight. The Seaboard is fluid, almost liquid; pitch slides feel natural and inevitable. The LinnStrument rewards intentional, deliberate expression. The Erae Touch is a blank slate, open and configurable.
A preset that feels alive on an Osmose might feel sluggish on a Seaboard. So the first question we always ask is: who is playing this, and on what? That shapes every routing decision that follows.
The Three Dimensions We Design For
MPE gives you three independent expressive axes beyond velocity: Slide (usually Y-axis or CC74), Pressure (channel aftertouch per note), and Glide (pitch bend per note). Every preset in Loopa has to make deliberate choices about all three — and those choices have to feel musical, not just technically correct.
Pressure is the most intimate. It's what a player feels in their body as they lean into a note. We use it to swell filter cutoff, add gentle vibrato after a moment of sustain, or push harmonic content into the upper partials. The key constraint: pressure response should never feel like a light switch. We spend a lot of time tuning curves so the transition from "no pressure" to "full pressure" passes through something interesting, not just loud.
Slide is about color and texture. A subtle Y-axis movement on a pad can shift between a warm, closed tone and something bright and glassy — that's the kind of variation a traditional MIDI keyboard can't communicate. In our deep house presets, we use Slide to modulate formant-style filters, giving chords a vowel-like quality when the player raises a finger mid-hold.
Glide is the most dangerous dimension. Unlimited pitch bend per note is expressive freedom — but it's also easy to make something that sounds like a broken pitch wheel. We tend to constrain glide ranges to musical intervals (a fourth, an octave) and add subtle friction through portamento curves, so sliding between notes still passes through recognizable pitches.
Why FabFilter Twin 3 and Phase Plant?
We get this question a lot. With so many synths available, why focus on these two for the first Loopa packs?
The honest answer is routing transparency. Both Twin 3 and Phase Plant let you see exactly what's happening with every modulation path — there's no hidden "MPE magic" happening behind the scenes. When we assign Pressure to filter resonance, we can see the modulation depth, the curve shape, the range. That makes it much easier to design presets that behave predictably across different controllers and playing styles.
Phase Plant's modular signal flow also means we can create layered textures where each MPE dimension affects a genuinely different part of the sound architecture — one operator, one effect chain, one filter stage. That granularity is what separates an MPE preset from a MIDI preset that happens to respond to aftertouch.
The Failures That Taught Us the Most
Not everything we try works. We've shelved dozens of presets that were technically impressive but musically frustrating — sounds where the expressive response was so dramatic that every accidental shift in pressure ruined a performance.
The best presets are the ones where a player can stop thinking about the controller and just play. That requires a kind of restraint in the design: knowing when a modulation depth should be 30% rather than 100%, when a response curve should be logarithmic rather than linear, when silence and stillness is the right answer.
We call this "invisible expressivity." The player doesn't experience the MPE routing — they experience their own intention reflected back through the sound.
What Comes Next
The first Loopa Presets MPE packs — covering deep house and cinematic textures — are nearly ready. Each pack will include presets optimized for the controllers mentioned above, with notes on how to adapt them to your specific setup.
And if you want the ultimate MPE instrument to pair them with, Orchestral Xpressive — our natively MPE orchestral instrument currently in pre-order at €99 — is built from the ground up with the same philosophy: every dimension of expression mapped to something musically meaningful, nothing left to chance.
The best sounds don't just fill space. They respond to the person playing them.