Expressive E Osmose CE review: The Cadillac of MIDI keyboards

Osmose CE 49 €999 Osmose CE 61 €1199 expressivee.com To improve upon the humble keyboard is no small thing. For at least 500 years, the principle behind those black and white keys has remained essentially the same: press down to trigger a sound. So when Expressive E unleashed the Osmose synthesiser in 2023 they quite rightly turned heads with their innovative keybed design. Andrew Huang gave it a rave review, Hans Zimmer gushed that the instrument allowed him to “transform a sound completely” while working on his soundtrack to the second instalment of Dune. Meanwhile, regular musos checked the price tag and shook their heads in dismay. But now we have the Osmose CE, an all-MIDI version that drops the onboard synth engine, lowers the entry fee, and still offers a next-generation playing experience. READ MORE: ROLI Airwave review: Prepare yourself for hyper-expressive MIDI control in six dimensions With all that in mind, there’s really only one place to start when evaluating Osmose CE: the keybed. The company bills it as ‘a keyboard unlike any other’ and it’s hard to disagree. The important thing here is that, in their pursuit of maximum MPE expressivity, the designers haven’t strayed too far from the solid foundation of black and white keys. In comparison to the ROLI Seaboard 2, which really does require mastering a unique playing style, the keybed on the Osmose CE takes a familiar experience and, quite literally, deepens it. Press down on a key and you hit the usual stopping point – but then you keep going, and going, and going. The amount of space for aftertouch pressure feels absolutely huge, even if officially it’s only seven millimetres of travel distance. In practice, this means that you can execute super fine pressure control over filter cutoffs, LFO depth, or really any parameter your heart desires. I find an unreasonable amount of joy in arpeggiating a held chord while gradually varying pressure depth for individual notes, creating shifting accents and timbres. Regarding the hands-on feel, it’s a firm, springy, ultra tactile experience – even if you do kinda feel like you’re kneading bread dough. But don’t think that you need a lot of force to get sound out of this thing since the keys have easily customisable sensitive ranges. So sensitive, in fact, that even an ultra light tap can produce sound if you wish. Image: Press Up and down is not the only axis in play here, there’s also side to side. Keys can be vigorously ‘wiggled’ to produce vibrato just as you might traditionally do on a stringed instrument. The left/right travel of each key does introduce one issue: keys can occasionally knock against each other. It could just be that I’m still getting used to the instrument, but when I play fast melody lines coupled with deep key presses, there are noticeable clicks as released keys snap back into place. Personally, I didn’t find this to be a dealbreaker, but for those looking to play virtuoso passages, it’s something to be aware of. While Osmose CE may lack the onboard synth engine of its big brother, it does add deep DAW integration. Tested across a number of workstations —including Cubase 15, Ableton 12, and Bitwig 6—implementation is solid. Using the 4.3-inch colour LCD, a handful of push buttons, and six clickable rotary knobs, you can navigate across tracks, activate loop regions, scrub through a session, open and close instrument plugins, control plugin macros, and start and stop recordings, all without touching a mouse or computer keyboard. If you’re using the instrument’s companion software, Ctrl-e, then the onboard screen displays additional guidance for navigating the different instruments and selecting presets. Ctrl-e interface. Image: Clovis McEvoy Ctrl-e is designed to take full advantage of Osmose CE’s expressive potential, but, for my money, it’s actually the weak link here. To be clear, none of the sound presets are bad, but they don’t exactly inspire me either. Perhaps that shortcoming is harder to ignore when the hardware itself is such a standout. This isn’t much of a concern as it’s simple enough to set Osmose CE up to work with a favoured software or hardware instrument. Using the onboard menu, you can switch between preset MIDI modes, including poly-aftertouch, multichannel, and classic keyboard, and to assign pressure and aftertouch gestures to individual continuous controller (CC) messages. It’s worth noting that, at present, side-to-side gestures are hardcoded to pitch bends and can’t be assigned to other control change messages – something I can only hope will be remedied in future updates. Ctrl-e interface. Image: Clovis McEvoy In addition, the unit comes with incredibly nifty onboard functions for arpeggiation and pitch glides. For example, it’s possible to assign individual arpeggio parameters to specific gestures – so, if you’d like to add some octave jumps only when you bend a note sideways, no problem! For pitch glides, you can set specific interval ranges within whic