There's a moment every MPE player knows. You load up a cinematic orchestral library — one of the big ones, hundreds of gigabytes, built for serious composers — and you play a single brass note. You apply pressure with your finger, expecting the note to swell, to breathe, to respond. And it doesn't. It just plays.
That moment is what started mpesynth.
The Gap in the Market
The orchestral sample library world is extraordinary. There are libraries with thousands of articulations, room tones from legendary halls, microphone positions that would make a recording engineer weep with envy. Cinematic Studio Strings. Spitfire Symphony Orchestra. Berlin Brass. These are incredible tools.
But almost none of them are built for MPE. They were designed for mouse-click articulation switching and velocity layers — a workflow built around the assumption that the keyboard is a trigger, not an instrument.
When MPE controllers arrived — the Roli Seaboard, the Expressive E Osmose, the LinnStrument — they brought a completely different assumption: that your hands should be able to shape sound in real time, continuously, the way a violinist shapes a bow stroke.
The software didn't keep up.
What We Set Out to Build
We wanted an orchestral instrument where MPE was not an afterthought. Not a "also supports MPE" checkbox in the marketing material. We wanted every patch to be designed around per-note expression from the start.
That means:
- CC74 slide that shifts timbre in musically meaningful ways — not just filter frequency
- Pressure response that feels like breath or bow pressure, not just volume
- Pitch bend calibrated for micro-expression, not just chromatic slides
- An architecture that's expandable — because one library is never the whole picture
Orchestral Xpressive is the result. The Cinematic Orchestra is the first sound bank: brass, strings, and orchestral FX, all MPE-native, all designed to be played rather than programmed.
Why Now
MPE has been around since 2018. Why build this now?
Because the hardware is finally mainstream enough to matter. The Osmose brought MPE to players who had never heard of Roli or LinnStrument. A traditional keyboard player can sit down at an Osmose and immediately feel the difference — no learning curve, no new technique required.
The audience for MPE cinematic instruments is bigger than it's ever been. And the tools to build compelling plugins — the DSP frameworks, the sampling infrastructure, the delivery platforms — are more accessible than ever.
This is the right moment.
Who mpesynth Is
We're a small team of musicians and developers obsessed with the intersection of expression and technology. We're not a sample library company that added MPE support. We're building from the other direction — starting with MPE and building everything around it.
Orchestral Xpressive is the first instrument. More will follow — different sonic territories, different controller optimisations, different moods. The sound bank model means we can ship new libraries continuously without rebuilding the engine every time.
If you've been waiting for an orchestral instrument that actually responds the way your hands move, Orchestral Xpressive was built for you.