Expressive E Osmose CE

The Osmose made quite a stir when it launched in 2023, not least in these pages. Can a controller version with the same super‑expressive keyboard cause the same impact?

The Osmose CE is the latest product from French company Expressive E. CE stands for ‘Controller Edition’ and, yes, it’s a version of their now three‑year old Osmose synth, without the onboard synth. Two models are available, with 49‑ and 61‑note keyboards.

The unique, enticing Osmose keyboard action supports left‑right key wobble vibrato, fluid polyphonic aftertouch, and can be exquisitely sensitive to the lightest of touches. Per‑note expressivity is achieved with standard MIDI message types, not any sort of arcane proprietary protocol, which is reassuring. And it seems to be the more familiar moving, mechanical nature of the keys that has allowed the Osmose to carve a deeper market niche than some MPE controllers that came before.

With the CE (as I’ll refer to it from now on) having no sounds of its own, computer integration features mean a lot. Consequently, Expressive E supply it with a new software synth called Ctrl‑e as part of the purchase cost. This is an unusual multi‑engine instrument that’s intended as the main software ‘voice’ of the CE, running on your Mac or Windows PC. You’re not absolutely bound to use it — the CE has broad scope as a MIDI controller separately from it — but it provides a premium experience with hundreds of sounds designed for the CE key action with no extra effort required on the part of the user. Presets are sortable, selectable and tweakable from the CE hardware controls, and potentially deeper editing is possible working with the computer. The CE is cheaper than its equivalent original‑model Osmose counterpart, but a good deal of its value is bound up with Ctrl‑e, literally and figuratively. Oh, and there are some general DAW control capabilities too, which is a jolly nice bonus.

Day & Night

As if to proudly announce its different design and use basis from the original black‑coloured Osmose, the CE is white! Well, mostly. A single coated‑aluminium sheet forms the upper, rear and front panels of the casework, with a tough textured plastic material for the remaining sides. Casework looks and feels to be of really good quality, and the unit is a little shallower in height than the original Osmose.

The CE’s hi‑res IPS LCD screen offers crispness, contrast and readability from all angles. It’s surrounded by four soft buttons above, another five elsewhere, six clickable encoders, and pitch and mod wheels that look and feel more like faders. There’s a lone volume knob, which seems to be reserved for DAW control duties.

What about that keyboard? In both the 49‑ and 61‑key CE versions there’s a standard, piano‑like 165mm octave width, and white keys a spacious 154mm playable surface length before merging with a rear section reaching back to a pivot.

The 61‑note version of the Osmose CE measures 90 x 300 x 1060 mm and weighs a hefty 11kg, while the 49‑key model measures 90 x 300 x 890 mm and weights 10kg.

I had a four‑octave Osmose alongside during the review and its keys seemed to offer a bit less resistance than the CE’s, but it’s hard to know whether that’s more to do with the natural loosening that happens after three years of regular use, or Expressive E’s move last year to in‑house manufacturing in Poland, or some other design or component change. Both felt equally good actually, just marginally different.

The playing sensation is plushly sprung rather than ‘weighted’. There’s an initial key travel of 9 to 10 mm to a bed of slight resistance. But keys can go down another 10mm or so, much deeper than any normal synth or piano action: a sinking feeling, but not unpleasant! All the while white keys can float about 3mm left or right, and black keys about the same, with more of a rocking motion. From these axes and phases of travel, for MPE‑style playing, the CE generates MIDI pressure, CC74 and pitch‑bend messages, respectively. Along with Note On/Off, they’re allocated to discrete MIDI channels behind the scenes, ultimately allowing you to swell or vibrate one pitch without affecting others. In some playing scenarios it’s possible to create the odd creak or clack from the CE keys, and to end up inadvertently bending deeply‑pressed notes, but a bit of adaptation of touch and awareness quickly improves this. If you have even a modicum of keyboard technique then all the main, musically useful Osmose gestures are very easily achieved.

Other real‑time control sources include the wheels/faders (generating global‑channel pitch‑bend and MIDI CC 1) plus two pedal inputs (defaulting to MIDI CC64 and CC1), which can be easily calibrated for all sorts of pedal types. In fact all these can be programmed to generate other message types. That’s true for the keys too, in fact.

Powering happens via USB‑C. A good‑quality braided 2m USB‑C cable is included, and when connected to a computer directly will power the CE and handle USB MIDI data at the same time. An additional USB socket is there though for when you need to power the unit separately, and a cheap mobile phone charger worked well for me. For that matter, the CE was also happy running off a single USB‑A to C cable from a powered USB 3 hub, so it does not seem especially fussy about power spec or USB port exclusivity.

On the back panel are full‑size MIDI out and in sockets, twin USB‑C ports and two quarter‑inch pedal inputs.

I was pleased to see the CE retains the Osmose’s DIN MIDI in and out sockets, so you’re not hidebound to USB. These can be switched in software to act like a simple 1‑in/1‑out MIDI interface for your computer if you like, but you’ll search in vain for the proprietary DIN mode used for the Haken Audio CVC voltage interface that can be found on the Osmose. Very few will miss that, I imagine.

Common Era

A quick systems‑check of MIDI flowing out of the CE via USB and DIN reveals nothing untoward. In ‘external midi’ mode (Expressive E are keen on their lower‑case typography...), there are four factory presets. ‘mpe’ is the default, giving the per‑key expression, very high key triggering (ie. note starts occurring only a millimetre or two down in the travel), and both initial pressure and aftertouch.

However, ‘multi‑channel’ and ‘poly aftertouch’ is available too, which helps give expression to synths and setups that don’t offer full MPE compatibility or achieve something like it through multi‑instance workarounds. Then there’s ‘classic keyboard’, which defeats most of the expressive stuff but is much better suited for playing classic synths, pianos and other conventional sounds. Note On messages are triggered lower in the key travel, there’s still channel aftertouch (affecting all sounding notes), and no key pitch‑bend.

If you have a specific (or indeed strange) requirement for data types, channel allocation and gesture sensitivity, the CE can probably support it, via three screens‑worth of parameters, and save it as a user preset. A happy time can usually be had playing all manner of software and hardware instruments. I hasten to point out, though, there is no multi‑zone controller functionality, to drive multiple external instruments simultaneously, on different channels with different settings. That’s getting much rarer generally in controller keyboards these days.

Ctrl‑e, here shown running as a VST3 plug‑in, is the Osmose CE’s primary software voice and sound bank. It offers as standard a lavish line‑up of interesting synths by some respected developers, can be controlled from the CE hardware controls, and is a key part of the package.Let’s lift our gaze from the CE to our computers now, and specifically the bundled Ctrl‑e software. A downloadable installer gets you up and running, though at 2GB it gives my cat (who, incidentally, leaps up on my MIDI controllers far too often) a run in the chonk stakes. There’s a reason for that though, as we’ll see in a minute.

Testing on a Mac, Ctrl‑e manifested for me as a VST3 and Audio Unit plug‑in. However, a printed quick‑start card that came with the CE intriguingly mentions an app too, and that would be a nice option to have, to avoid the encumbrance of a DAW host for some work. I hope it appears in time. As I was using early version software and firmware, prior to the CE’s official announcement and release, this and a few other absences and glitches are understandable.

The most notable thing then, when you instantiate Ctrl‑e in a DAW, is its extensive soundware content, which is surprisingly more generous than I expected. It’s not one synth but many, containing the full engines of no fewer than nine virtual instruments that are all separate products in their own right. That explains the installation size. Many ‘expressive suites’ as listed on the EE website are here, but there are interesting new contenders too. I’ve listed what they are in the ‘Nine Piece Suite’ box...

Select a synth on the left and its preset provision appears in a list on the right. Or don’t, and use the ‘types’ and ‘characters’ filtering in the middle to generate a subset of sounds that may span multiple engines. Or do both, to drill down into sound varieties for your favourite synth. There’s a text search too, and a favourites system. It’s all implemented very nicely, is dead easy to use, and sounds typically load in about a second even if switching synth engines.

Some really fabulous presets lurk amongst all these synths, spanning a huge range of varieties and styles. Hardly any are gimmicky (I’m thinking superficially impressive but essentially useless sequenced patches, for example), and as long as your DAW is MPE‑compatible the playing experience with the Osmose CE should be impeccable, maxing the expressive mojo. For each sound eight pre‑configured macros (from 16 slots available in total) are provided, allowing for tweaks or more drastic changes of brightness, timbre, modulation amounts and effects (on the whole). Suitably altered presets can then be saved for later recall from a ‘user’ tab.

While their sound engines are not compromised in any way, these synths are not the same as the full product: they’re effectively ‘player’ versions, with a smaller preset list, and the macros constituting the entirety of the sound‑design scope. But what’s nice is that, if you do happen to already own (or subsequently buy) one of the full versions, Ctrl‑e will notice and give you access to the full synth GUI without having to instantiate it separately. As Zyklop and Vital are available for free, downloading those will let you experience this way of working even if you don’t want to shell out for anything else on the list.

Synths you own can have their full user interfaces exposed in Ctrl‑e, for unfettered editing, like Dawesome’s Zyklop, shown here. Those you don’t appear with an attractive placeholder window, with editing restricted to pre‑configured macros, as illustrated by Kilohearts’ excellent Phase Plant.

Expressive E tell me that it’ll ultimately be possible to equip Ctrl‑e with more instruments, and to add more factory patch content for user‑owned instruments. At the same time some current ‘expressive suite’ synths (like AAS’s Lounge Lizard and u‑he’s Hive) won’t be added, for technical or licensing reasons. But that doesn’t stop them being instantiated and used separately of course.

C Everything

Everything I’ve described so far should work with any MPE‑compatible DAW. Owners of Ableton Live 12, Steinberg Cubase 15, Bitwig Studio 5 and Logic Pro 12 can enjoy tighter integration with their CEs, though. In the case of Cubase and Logic a simple control surface script must be installed, but Bitwig and Live should have the requisite scripts as standard by the time you read this, with their latest version updates.

Work with one of these DAWs and the CE will offer a new operating mode, ‘daw control’. Now the four soft‑keys above the screen become DAW transport buttons — play, stop, record‑enable and click‑enable — as suggested by their panel labelling graphics. Encoders move sequence playback position and loop location, select tracks, and open or close any instantiated instrument plug‑in on them. Track and device names appear in the CE display along with values for track level, pan and two send levels. Those can be tweaked using the four encoders nearby, and encoder presses will mute and solo tracks.

More is possible via a shift button, including repurposing the big panel buttons, which otherwise step through presets or shift octaves, to Undo, Redo and apply Quantise, and access a tempo screen.

Ctrl‑e gets its own integration too. An alternative control mode lets you use your CE encoders to work the plug‑in list, patch tags, and to select and load presets. And at the press of a button the hardware encoders can control the eight synth macros, for hardware‑like tweaking. Pressing encoder 1 toggles it between controlling macro 1 and 5. Pressing 2 toggles between 2 and 6, and so on.

For full transparency I should mention that DAW integration was largely but not yet fully functional in both DAWs I tested with (Live and Bitwig Studio). Also I found the macro tweaking was much too strongly governed by speed and acceleration sensing from the encoders for my liking, and often didn’t feel very analogue. These were all known issues on a development roadmap I saw, though, so once again I’ll take EE’s word for it that this will all come good: there’s no reason to suspect not.

CE Oh!

As it happens, I’m a fan of the original Osmose and I like what’s possible with its in‑built EaganMatrix synth. But you pay a premium for that, and in terms of sheer timbral range as well as user‑friendliness and programming depth it’s fair to say it’s now outstripped by the Osmose CE and Ctrl‑e combo; as long as you’re content to use a computer, of course. Many of the Ctrl‑e synths are boldly unconventional, but are classy and inspiring too. And you don’t have to use them: the CE remains a good, flexible controller for lots of other hardware and software synths and sample libraries alike.

Could anything be better? Full compatibility with a broader range of DAWs would be an obvious one. Another would be the ability to generate some generic controller messages from the CE encoders, outside of any special computer integration: currently, user‑defined MIDI CC messages can be sourced only from the two sliders and two pedals, and the volume pot was inactive for me outside of DAW control duties. Maybe that latter aspect will change in time, at least.

The Osmose CE is flexible enough for general MIDI control duties but, with Ctrl‑e especially, can also take you light years beyond where most other controllers can go...

However, looking at the whole package, what Expressive E have done is really impressive. The Osmose CE is flexible enough for general MIDI control duties but, with Ctrl‑e especially, can also take you light years beyond where most other controllers can go, seamlessly and effortlessly. It’s a super new option in the expressive synth world.

Information

Osmose CE 49‑note €999, 61‑note €1199. Prices include VAT.

www.sourcedistribution.co.uk

www.expressivee.com

Osmose CE 49‑note $999, 61‑note $1199.

www.expressivee.com

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