# Expressive-e Noisy (Touché)



## Jkist (Dec 29, 2020)

noisy


Bring resonance to acoustic and electronic worlds play video




www.expressivee.com





Looks kind of interesting. Anybody bought this yet? What are your thoughts? While we're on that topic, anybody have one of those Touche controller things? They designed this VST so that it integrates very well with their controller.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 30, 2020)

I've got it and haven't had a chance to dig into it deeply yet, so there may be things I've missed that will change my opinion. I've tried it with a Touché SE and a TEC breath/bite/tilt controller. Overall, so far it's a bit of a good news/bad news proposition.

The good news for anyone without a Touché is that it plays nice with other controllers. Though the setup page is called MIDI Learn, it doesn't force you to use MIDI learn: you can just pick the CC numbers from a menu, so you don't have the issue of learning the wrong CC just because you breathed into a controller or wobbled a parameter at the wrong moment. The integration with the Touché isn't very deep other than the default CCs are mapped to it.

The bad news is that the controller settings seem to be global. Though this makes it easy to audition different patches, for an instrument like this, I think you really want to be able to save CC setups as presets themselves as there will be situations where you want to remap them for different kinds of instruments.

The good news on the sound generator side is that, in combination with something like a Touché, it sounds pretty alive. The Touché is really good for scraping and bouncing hammer-type gestures that are tough to pull off on a keyboard or a pad surface. The subtractive synth and filter section sounds convincing enough. The resonators and combs get you into physical-modelling territory easily enough. The bad news is that it is a fairly limited architecture other than the fact you can layer up about six oscillator/resonator combinations.

The second bit of bad news is that, bizarrely, it's really only set up to have one primary expression control channel. What it gives you on this is good, in that you have separate rise and fall lag parameters for expression, which makes it easier to play different kinds of instrument simulations. You can hit the Touché, for example, and let it go and the expression control will rise and fall back to zero based on the lag settings. This is the kind of thing that makes breath controllers far easier to use as you don't have to be as precise with the blowing.

But, it seems weird to couple a four-axis expression controller to a synth like this. And you can see it in the presets, which have a samey quality to them because the up and down axes are typically simply mapped to the two synth layers expression channels and the left and right are mapped to effects control. The FX control has potential but it's a slightly odd selection. I feel it could really do with a granulator like the Absynth Aetheriser and a phase distortion module or waveshaper like, er, Absynth again rather than the basic distortion you get in Noisy.

I can't for the life of me find a way to map the X and Y directions in the oscillator panel (which controls the waveform harmonics) to different CCs. I can map the amounts or the LFO amplitude but not things that control the sound directly. Part of the problem here is that there is a long, inscrutable list of parameters in the MIDI Learn page so it might well be there - I just haven't found it yet. But I'm not confident it's actually there.

The other issue is the comparative lack of flexibility in the synth engine. My feeling, though not fully tested, is that Brian Clevinger's Plasmonic has a lot more potential with controllers like the Touché though you have to do a bit more custom mapping yourself. In fact, I'm seriously considering building some of the architecture of Noisy into some Absynth presets as most of the necessary plumbing seems to be in place in that venerable synth other than the ability to set rise and fall lag independently and the lack of a second full synth layer (though hardly a showstopper in DAWs that let you stack instruments easily).

tl;dr - some interesting ideas and you can get organic sounds out of it easily but a bit of a miss given what else is out there and that the controller integration is more workable than seamless.


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## Jkist (Dec 30, 2020)

Thanks so much for taking the time to write that! How do you like the Touche as a controller? Think its worth the money? Seems pretty cool, but I dont know many people that own one.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 30, 2020)

The Touché is surprisingly good at teasing out expression. I say surprising because it's a pretty simple piece of gear and doesn't even give you four independent degrees of freedom (because obviously you can't move it left and right at the same time and the forward/backward motion involves some degree of linkage). But it feels like someone spent a lot of time with prototypes to come up with a decent balance of size, weight and responsiveness. It encourages me (at least) to use gestures that I wouldn't normally use with other controllers: it's really good for "hitting" things as well as as bowing-type gestures. So it does feel like playing some oddball instrument with the Touché under one hand and a keyboard under the other, and readily lends itself to organic sounds. I think if you want something that conveys expression more readily than a slider or you don't like breath controllers (or want something that behaves differently if you do), it's worth the money. But, as with any external controllers, you do need to work on setting things up to make it work optimally with the instruments you want to use. 

One issue is that you need the Lié software to have the left/right axis work for pitchbend and for the target plugin to be hosted by Lié. I am very cautious about any piece of hardware that relies on separately hosted, proprietary software for some or all its functions (that may not apply to the full Touché though, which has CV outputs as well as MIDI IIRC). The Linnstrument has a big advantage over the ROLI controllers in this respect. But the Touché does emit regular CC values so it's not dependent on Lié.


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## Novatlan Sound (Dec 30, 2020)

I really like Noisy so far. Very inspiring and it is a joy to play with the Touché.
I made a video about the Touché a while ago. 

)

Basically most of what applies to Lié also applies to Noisy in terms of control, but I like that Noisy has its own sonic signature.
I might do a follow-up video


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## joyneski (Jan 4, 2021)

I've got a Touché (which I really like), so I took a punt on Noisy while it was on special offer as there were enough interesting sounds in the demo videos to make me think I may find it useful. Sadly, after spending a fair bit of time with it over the last few days, I've emailed Expressive asking for a refund. Like @gamma-ut I found many of the presets quite samey, and I don't find the Noisy interface that easy to navigate.

However, my main issue is the lack of flexibility with controlling/automating its parameters. As far as I can see, Noisy has loads of parameters - I tried counting them from the drop-down list that comes up in Lié, and gave up after about 150 - but you can automate/control only eight of them via Lié. Unless I'm missing something, that's it - Reaper doesn't recognise any of Noisy's parameters apart from Lié's eight macrocontrollers. Plus, choosing the parameters for the macrocontrollers means squinting at this drop-down list of 150+ abbreviations which I find both hard to understand (I have a vague understanding of what fx_delay_lfo_gain_exp_fall means from reading the manual, but - yeah...), and just hard to read on my screen. 

Last night I downloaded the demo for Diva and think it's quite ironic that I found it quicker and easier to get interesting parameters in Diva mapped to Touché than I could with Noisy, because they all appear in Reaper's parameters list and it was a doddle to allocate them to Touché's CC numbers (I especially liked setting up an AD envelope to move between sharp attack/slow decay to slow attack/sharp decay by just pushing Touché to the right, which often sounds just wonderful in Diva).

It's a shame - as I say, I really like the Touché, but Noisy's too limited for me in its current state.


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## gamma-ut (Jan 5, 2021)

I think if you run Noisy directly in Reaper rather than hosting it in Lié and running that in Reaper, the automation should be exposed and it will still be mapped to the Touché defaults (minus the ability to drive pitchbend from the Touché).

I haven't tested this in Reaper (as I don't use it) but I tried it in Live as it makes it easier to see how automation targets will map and it worked. In fact, doing it in Live is handy for finding what certain knobs are called on the MIDI Learn page if you don't fancy reverse engineering their names.


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## joyneski (Jan 5, 2021)

A-ha! Good call, hadn't thought of that (derp). So...yes, the parameters are all showing up in Reaper, but now there's another problem: a 16-voice/6-stack Diva pad in Divine mode plays a fairly simple MIDI pattern using 6.8% CPU. I switch over to playing the same pattern with a 8-voice pad preset in Noisy (running as a VST, not in Lié) and the CPU hit ramps up to _24%_. I just tried with several of the pad presets and they all did pretty much the same (The Juno Complex went up to 30%). 

However - when I run the same presets in Lié, the CPU hit almost halves. 

So it looks like I can have full automation and a massive CPU hit, or very limited automation and a gentler CPU hit (still more than Diva tho', and Diva's meant to be a CPU-hog). @gamma-ut, do you see similar behaviour in Live when using Noisy as a VST against using it in Lié? Maybe it's a Reaper issue - ???

Whatever. Still thinking that if I had been able to demo this first it'd have been a pass. FWIW: PC specs = Intel i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz (4 CPUs), 8GB RAM, Windows 10, Reaper 6.13; so not especially high-end, but enough for Noisy according to the manual. Running Diva hasn't been an issue.


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## gamma-ut (Jan 5, 2021)

I'm on a Mac, and this has become something of an issue with a number of plugins including some old ones like Battery (due to the way Apple has arsed around with Core Graphics in recent years), but I've found a massive difference in CPU depending on whether the UI is open or not in the case of Noisy. Shutting it down cuts CPU from 100% of one core at some points to around 25% of one core on a six-core machine. In Lié I very rarely have Noisy's UI's showing and the CPU is way down then, so it might be that.

I think it's the animation. It doesn't do a lot but it hammers the CPU. I saw a similar issue with Krotos Concept when I tried it.


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## joyneski (Jan 5, 2021)

Ah, OK - now you mention it, I think I've had similar issues with some other VSTs, but I don't remember any of them having as savage a CPU hit as this.

Thanks for your replies - they've been very helpful. I'll go and have another play with modulating parameters via Reaper without looking at the UI, but frankly Noisy is going to have to produce some astonishly amazingly beautiful sounds to change my mind about getting a refund. Quelle dommage...


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## gamma-ut (Jan 5, 2021)

I'm hanging on to mine but I think there's plenty of room for improvement. Good luck with the refund.


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## joyneski (Jan 6, 2021)

Bad news and good news:
Bad: Closing the UI _didn't_ stop the CPU spike when hosting Noisy in VST mode, so there were evidently other issues involved (in Reaper anyway).
Good: Expressive E refunded my payment within a day of requesting it, so kudos to them. I didn't give any explanation for wanting a refund apart from "sorry - not my kind of synth", and they didn't question it. 
Minor whinge: I did lose about £4 on the transaction due to the £ increasing about 5% in value against the Euro since I paid for it, but hey, the international financial markets need all the help they can get right now and I for one am happy to give it to them _#bludgeoningsarcasm_


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## CGR (Jan 12, 2021)

joyneski said:


> Ah, OK - now you mention it, I think I've had similar issues with some other VSTs, but I don't remember any of them having as savage a CPU hit as this.
> 
> Thanks for your replies - they've been very helpful. I'll go and have another play with modulating parameters via Reaper without looking at the UI, but frankly Noisy is going to have to produce some astonishly amazingly beautiful sounds to change my mind about getting a refund. Quelle dommage...


I've been reading this thread after having recently bought a Touché SE. Having a ball re-discovering all my old soft synths and extracting new colours & tones from them with the Touché. Regarding the link between CPU hit and GUI being displayed, FWIW I've had similar issues with Sonible's Smart:_Reverb. _The animated GUI hits the CPU hard – it also has real-time, gradated colours displaying the state of the parameters – so I always close the GUI when using it.


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