Expressive E Noisy 2

The Noisy 2 interface is colourful and clear. In this synth Layer view all three main types of resonator have been selected.

Expressive E’s idiosyncratic synth sequel puts MPE front and centre.

You could never accuse French company Expressive E of being conventional. Following the release of their innovative Touché expressive controller pad in 2017 they’ve put out a range of distinctive software synths and patch collections and more recently, significantly, the Osmose hardware synth.

Their latest offering is Noisy 2, a plug‑in software synth that’s an update of the original Noisy from 2020, which had a notably colourful, funky interface. The new version is easier on the eye, and more importantly adds new synthesis features as well as a scheme for handling signals coming in from MPE‑enabled controllers. As MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) and expressive keyboards become ever more widespread the onus will be on developers to make synths that properly cater for them, rather than just delivering MPE‑readiness in some generic sense, and Noisy 2 looks to be all about that. How does it work out in practice?

Art Of Noise

Some basics to start, so we know what we’re dealing with. Noisy 2 runs as a VST2, VST3 or Audio Unit plug‑in on macOS 11/ Windows 10 or later. It’s a dual‑layer synth, with two identical sound engines running in parallel, outputting into a shared suite of effects. Maximum polyphony is eight notes, though you can restrict it to fewer voices too, down to a monophonic ‘legato’. The user interface is tabbed, so in use you’re mostly viewing either Layer 1 or Layer 2, or the FX tab. A header bar has facilities to transpose layers by octaves, adjust their volumes, and disable each element.

A quick glance at one of the synth layer user interfaces reveals this isn’t another Minimoog emulation. All will become even clearer in a minute I hope, but essentially Noisy 2’s sound production is based on a trio of resonators that are excited by a single noise source. There are 21 different kinds of unpitched noise, from the synthetic and algorithmic (‘velvet’, ‘white’, etc) to others (‘rain’, ‘frying’, etc) that probably started life as field recordings. The resonators visible across the bottom of the window sound in response to this signal. They can be enabled individually, and each offers six different sonic characters: two somewhat like analogue synth oscillators, and four complex physical models. Actually, courtesy of a mixer (which will operate with stereo pans or in a CPU‑saving mono mode) you can also expose the noise source directly too, so there’s a potential maximum of four tone generators per voice.

Next along the signal chain is a resonant (though not self‑oscillating) multimode filter with five modes: 12 and 24 dB/octave low‑pass, plus 12dB/octave band‑pass, ‘band‑stop’ and high‑pass. There’s a cute graphical joke here, with the cutoff knob appearing chunkier when you select the Moog‑inspired 24dB ladder. Then there’s an output module with a soft‑clip distortion stage that includes a feedback loop and goes from light harmonic excitation to much thicker, bass‑heavy distortion.

Outputs of the synth layers finally feed into four stereo effect processors connected in series. The first two are identical multi‑algorithm types that can rustle up tremolo, more low‑pass and high‑pass filters (though not on a per‑voice basis here), auto‑pan, distortion, ‘noisifier’, ring modulation, three types of phaser, and a chorus. Finally there’s a quite well‑equipped stereo delay with delay times up to 5s, and a sparkly, open plate reverb with decay times up to about 20 seconds.

Noisy 2 comes with plenty of presets: 700 or so to suit standard non‑MPE MIDI controllers, and about 500 for owners of Osmoses, Seaboards, Push 3s, Linnstruments and more. Main presets load settings for both synth layers, effects and some associated parameters in about one second, but there are also single‑timbre presets available for each synth layer, allowing for quick mix‑and‑match pairings.

Onboard effects are versatile and sound good, and what’s more their parameters can be controlled in real time from your touch, or a hardware MIDI controller.

Devil Inside

Noisy 2’s synth signal chain, of ‘oscillators’ (a term which is never used, by the way) feeding a filter, might make you think it’s just a variation on a typical analogue subtractive synth design. In a simplistic way it is, and in fact it can be made to sound attractively synthetic and analogue. But there’s a lot that’s unusual too.

To begin with, many of the modulation sources we’d expect to see on a typical synth seem to be missing here. The are no banks of envelope generators — only a simple attack/decay shaper in the Expression Control module — and only one rather simple LFO.

Instead, it’s the inputs from your playing that are intended to become the primary sources of modulation. That’s a concept that might be familiar to Osmose and Haken...