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

Product Information

For more experienced players, there’s the MPE functionality and this is one of the most affordable ways to get into the MPE control world. 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. The results are often surprising and useful, and Play is a fun way of helping players of all levels generate new musical ideas. The third-generation MiniLab is a similar offering to its predecessor, giving you a compact 25-note keyboard, various other control features and plenty of sounds courtesy of the tightly integrated Analog Lab intro software that comes included. Like the Sensel Morph, the Joué itself is a generic multi‑touch sensor — the modules are essentially passive (though they are configurable, as described below). Unlike the Sensel, the Joué doesn't feature Bluetooth for wireless operation, and its interfacing is purely MIDI. Getting Started

You can also control instruments and automation, browse presets from Image-Line plugins and assign custom controls. Fretboard: A guitar-style fretboard with nine 'frets' and six 'strings' emulating the standard EADGBE tuning. (There's an option to tune the individual strings to other notes.) It's possible to pitch bend along a string (a gesture referred to as vibrato), but the most extreme pitch bending (which is upwards only) comes from the 'bending' gesture, pushing strings upwards or downwards. Aftertouch (pressure) is also supported. There are two configurable buttons, which I found most useful when programmed as toggles for the vibrato and bending functions. I found the fretboard's pitch modulation harder to control than on the keyboards; there's no MPE glide facility, and you have to tweak the vibrato and bending controls by ear. Conveniently, a set of buttons beside the Joué image allow generated control messages to be filtered by X, Y and Z dimensions individually, making it much easier to use 'MIDI learn' to bind controllers to parameters in instruments and DAWs. Billed as the first dedicated MIDI keyboards for FL Studio, the FLKey 37 and FLKey Mini integrate fully with Image-Line’s DAW, and promising "seamless music production and an intuitive workflow”. Developed by Arnaud Rousset and Pascal Jouguet (co-creator of the JazzMutant Lemur multitouch controller, best known for use by Björk), this is a modular system with a wooden baseboard, and up to four different control layouts, connecting to macOS, Windows, or iOS.

We get playful with this advanced, but organic, approachable, controller for the Joué app (and beyond)

The Mini is a flexible little controller that you can take anywhere and fits into the smallest nook in your studio or live rig, but if we were going to choose just one model, it’d be the FLkey 37. The display and the extra buttons, plus its expanded playing functions, make it worth the extra money and the extra space - recommended for any FL Studio user seeking keyboard integration and hardware control. Switch pads on the fly to instantly transform your Joue Play into a guitar, piano, drums or keyboard and explore their assigned sound banks.

The most significant improvement over the original Rise might well be the Keywave2 silicone playing surface, which provides ‘frets’ that enable players to more accurately judge the position of their fingers on each key. As well as making Rise 2 more playable than its predecessor, it's also easier for players accustomed to standard keyboards to get to grips with. The slim keys are joined by pads, faders and knobs, plus touchstrips for pitchbend and modulation and a new OLED display. There’s also a built-in arpeggiator, a Chord mode and custom DAW presets for Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro, Bitwig Studio and Reason. Joue Play's pad overlays take on an aquatic theme with this Water Edition. Versatile, multi-touch control over MIDI allows you to take charge of software including the Joue Play app. You will be able to choose between 5 modes: Major, Minor, Pentatonic major, Pentatonic minor and Chromatic, by defining the starting note of the scale, the "root note".Whenever a module is edited, or a new preset is called up, and the result dragged to the Joué, the module state is apparently loaded into the module itself (there's a small RFID chip in each one), rather than into the Joué. If you only have one Joué and one module of each type, this technical detail is unlikely to affect your workflow much, but you'll only be able to load a preset into a module if that module is physically sitting in the Joué to start with. Modules

The 25-note keyboard is said to be more playable than before, with improved velocity response. With just two octaves to work with, though, there’s not going to be a great deal of scope for giving two-handed performances. So that digital music can rhyme with sustainability, the Joue Play was designed to last, just as acoustic instruments. Production is carried out with suppliers at 80% located in France, using sustainable materials. The Joué Play should attract newcomers and seasoned musicians alike. 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.The Joue Play combines an expressive multi-instrument, an intuitive application and interactive content to practice. It's also a MIDI controller compatible with all MIDI music softwares (DAWs). 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. MPE polyphonic glide works fine: A glissando option switches between the playing of glissandos (with all intermediate notes triggering) versus being able to glide a single note across multiple keys. This does need a bit of setting up: after some experimentation I discovered that setting a glissando value of 48 semitones in the Joué editor resulted in the correct pitch generation while gliding between keys — at least, that certainly seemed to be the case with Equator and Cypher2. Joué tell me that some instruments don't necessarily adhere to the same pitch range, hence the ability to change it. If you thought that you’d seen the last of ROLIand its Seaboardrange of controllers, think again, as we now have the Seaboard Rise 2.