Plasmonic and Bazille are two of my MPE favorites. Vital is also great for MPE since every mod target has its own curve.

I use Bitwig and all the Bitwig Instruments are excellent for MPE. The possibilities go well beyond what most MPE supported synths can do.

And Bitwig now supports CLAP plugin format. U-he has public CLAP betas of ACE, Diva and Hive. All 3 can now use Bitwig's modulators per voice. Like Bitwig's Instruments, that opens up lots of interesting MPE possibilities for ACE, Diva and Hive.

Linnstrument is my main controller.

The free and open source Surge XT! (Which is now also officially the LinnStrument synth, if you saw the newsletter)

Also, Roger released a set of patches for Logic as well. A couple nice ones in that set.

Really dig the Micromonsta as a sort of hardware companion.

I mainly play with my right hand anyway (I'm right handed). There didn't seem to be any problem with my brain adapting to the fretboard patterns it knows and loves from left to right hand. Going from fretboard to Linnstrument was easy and intuitive.

I’m a terrible keyboard player, but I find there are things that are easier to play smoothly on a keyboard than the Linnstrument.

Linnstrument, for me, is great for big jumps and slow-moving parts.

I can play quick, closely spaced melodic runs much more smoothly on a keyboard.

Maybe over time my Linnstrument technique will improve, but that’s where I’m at right now.

It's worth mentioning that the Linnstrument has a guitar mode which treats each row as a string, where you silently fret notes in the left split, then strum/pick the string in the right split. It may help improve hand timing if that's the world you're coming from, but I will say that it's extremely difficult to play it like a guitar since you're dealing with a 6" instead of 2" fretboard where you can't really barre or mute strings. It still has some fun potential, though.

(Sorry for the cross-posting to several fora, I'm trying to reach as many users as possible.)

The Linnstrument firmware resets pressure data at note on/off, and only sends pressure data for the most recent pad held. For non-MPE synths (or any synth played in One Channel or Channel per Row mode), this causes an abrupt jump in Z-values from 0 to/from the value of whatever prior pad is held. This behavior is similar for Y-values.

I fixed it in a non-supported and no-promises-made custom firmware, with the result that playing non-MPE synths is more predictable, and Z-data and Y-data is more usable to control synth parameters. The changes do not negatively impact MPE function, or other mode use-cases.

This change was prompted by a discussion on KVR.

The binary release is on Github:

t01.001

Again, this is unofficial firmware, use at your own risk.

Then again, everyone is welcome to try it, and I'd appreciate any comments. Thanks.