Joué Play | 4-in-1 Portable Digital Instrument, with Powerful and Easy-to-use Musical App Included - Plug & Play Music

Product Information

We also think this’ll be a kid-friendly instrument, finding a home in SEN teaching situations where individual students have different needs for how they play.

Joué’s new Play controller, several years in development, falls into the latter camp and is unique in how it combines physical and virtual components. For beginners, it’s fun and rewarding to play – the developers mention teaching music to kids as one application, and that’s certainly something it’s primed for.I suppose another reason to wonder if it was just a firmware issue is if ‘initial note velocity’ calculations are still ok.

We've had boutique controllers since at least the first Monome (Sound On Sound September 2008), and the Joué is in similar tradition, coming from a small French company led by the creator of the original Lemur controller. Each additional note reduces the range of aftertouch values for previous note, and after 4 notes it’s very difficult to get any output.You can't rotate the module (to get the buttons at the bottom, for instance): the Joué expects all the controls to be in a specific orientation. The soundpack contains 10 presets, ranging from guitar-with-effects patches to traditional instruments (Cymbalum, Koto), and Workstation allows effects processing to be tweaked according to taste. Sometimes Movement adds reverb, sometimes it changes a sound’s attack, and other times it introduces crunchy distortion.

The last tricky thing is dealing with the notes slipping in and out of colliding, but the inertia function should have that in there. For testing I used ROLI Equator and FXpansion Cypher2 (which are MPE-capable), both stand-alone and in Bitwig Studio, and I also fired up Cycling '74 Max to inspect MIDI controller messages more closely.

Channel aftertouch is generated in isolation from each pad, so if you press multiple pads at once, the value transmitted will jump around inconsistently. In addition to that I’ve taken it apart to see what’s under the hood: surprisingly solid wood and solid construction.

The board is made from French beechwood, and metal, and feels more substantial than the average budget controller with wooden elements reminiscent of Snyderphonics Manta, and Livid Instruments’ Ohm. At one end is a single USB-C port that carries power to the unit and data from it, and in the box you get USB-C and USB-A cables as well as a USB-C to Lightning, covering pretty much all computers, tablets and smartphones. My main critique of Joué is that simply making the limits transparent to players like us would have gone a long way in fully utilizing our boards, regardless of firmware limitations. Yes, I checked and there are effectively 4 horizontal strips and 12+ vertical strips that record aftertouch, based on the dimensions of the matrix pad. Combine all controllers into one device that you'll always have at hand on the go, in the studio or on stage.A Fretboard preset is open for editing, although the device itself is running the chromatic Scaler module. The editor manages presets (left-hand panel), and allows MIDI configuration on a preset-by-preset basis (right-hand panel). I dont mind whether your solution is python or javascript or something else, but I would probably like to run it on a rasperry pi eventually, as part of a permanent small solution that doesnt need to use my main computers. On another level, it’s also just fun to play instruments in a different way, moving notes and controls to see what happens in a way you wouldn’t do on an 88-key piano, for example. There are settings for each element but I think the elements are hardcoded as areas in the firmware.