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

Product Information

The sounds are pretty impressive, especially when you start to jazz them up a bit with the effects sliders. Usefully, the actions you perform on the effects are recorded as part of the clips in the Joué app as automation, which makes it easy to spice up your loops and make them more intriguing. The app allows you to add multiple parts of different bar lengths and quantise or delete the recordings, though not edit in any greater depth than that. Combined with the ability to layer sounds, you can make multi-part, multi-instrument projects and then export them as audio mixdowns, stems or MIDI files. 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 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. 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. My unit arrived with a full complement of modules, which we'll look at below. Notionally the Joué has space for three modules at once, if they are a standard square shape (9cm on a side), but some modules are double- or triple-width. They are held in place magnetically, though you'll need to have the Joué fully populated or they'll have a tendency to shift around under your fingers.

Key Features

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 Joué's initial selection of modules (minus the Grand Clavier).We'll look at the modules in turn, starting with the smallest and simplest. 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.

You can also control instruments and automation, browse presets from Image-Line plugins and assign custom controls. Music technology designers put a lot of effort into creating novel MIDI performance experiences for their users. These can take the form of more conventional keyboards and pads, or sometimes touch systems, like those from ROLI and Sensel. 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. The MPE controller is accessible to beginners but is a powerful tool to help experienced musicians create new patterns, with an additional editor app for deeper control. 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. 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.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. Practice by learning the basics or by replaying a selection of famous songs step by step through a series of video tutorials, also available as projects in the Joue Play App. 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.

Portability is further aided by a battery power option, which promises to give you more than 14 hours of runtime. You can also power the keyboard via USB.

French Verb Play

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. Rounds: A set of four rotary knobs or encoders, operated by fingertip just within the circular ridge of each control (or, perhaps as intended, along the ridge itself). The ridges have slight bumps at what would be minimum, maximum and centre locations for conventional potentiometers — useful for operation without looking at your hands, and hitting the centre location (MIDI value 64) was surprisingly easy. There's no auto-reset value as with the bubble controls. I found the infinite encoder emulation more useful, and that comes with a speed multiplier setting depending on the accuracy you desire. Again, 14-bit resolution is (theoretically) available. There's no Z/aftertouch support in this module. Besides this, you must set the port to 1 for the MPE controller and any instruments you'd like to control should be set to port 2. If you need to use patterns to control different MPE instruments I'd recommend using Patcher to route the appropriate MIDI ports, to be triggered by automation within the pattern. If you have upper zone MPE enabled make sure to change the MPE Channel 16/1 controls to MIDI channel 1 so you don't miss your first played notes! Joue Play's unique technology offers a sensational expressiveness. Express yourself in the moment with natural gestures and enjoy all the spontaneity and expressiveness of acoustic instruments. 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”.