What is MPE? A Simple Guide to MIDI Polyphonic Expression
- Noise Harmony
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
MPE, or MIDI Polyphonic Expression, is one of those things that completely changes how you interact with your instruments—especially if you care about detail, dynamics, and realism in your sound. It’s not just a fancy buzzword. MPE fixes some of MIDI’s oldest limitations and gives you way more control over what your playing actually feels like.
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Let’s go back for a second. Traditional MIDI, the version we’ve been using since the early 80s, was a game changer in its time. It allowed synths, drum machines, and computers to talk to each other. But there’s a catch: in most cases, all the expression data—like pitch bends, filter movement, or aftertouch—gets applied globally to the whole channel. So if you’re holding a chord and push the pitch bend wheel, the whole chord bends. Same with modulation, vibrato, whatever. Everything moves together.
That’s where MPE comes in. It takes the standard MIDI protocol and gives each note its own channel. So if you’re playing three notes, each one gets treated like its own “instrument” with its own mod wheel, pitch bend, pressure, and more. This means you can bend just one note in a chord, or apply a filter sweep to only one finger, while the others stay steady. It feels more like playing a real instrument—like a guitar, where each string can be bent separately.
MPE recognizes five main types of movement or “dimensions” for each finger:
Strike (velocity, or how hard you hit the note),
Glide (left-right movement, usually mapped to pitch),
Slide (up-down movement, great for timbral changes like brightness),
Pressure (how much force you’re applying after the initial hit),
Lift (release velocity, how fast or slow you let go of the note).
All of these are tracked per note. That’s huge. It means you can play a synth with the same kind of nuance you get on an acoustic instrument. You can do vibrato by gently wiggling your finger, swell the brightness by pressing harder, or slide into a pitch like on a fretless bass. It’s very physical, very tactile.
Of course, it’s not magic—it does require the right gear. You’ll need an MPE-compatible controller like the ROLI Seaboard, Expressive E Osmose, Haken Continuum, LinnStrument, or something similar. These devices are built to send that kind of multi-dimensional data. Then you need a DAW that can handle it—Bitwig, Logic Pro, Ableton Live (from version 11), or Cubase, for example. And finally, your synth or plugin needs to actually respond to MPE data. Popular soft synths like Equator2, Serum, Pigments, and Ableton’s Wavetable.
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It’s worth noting: because each note gets its own MIDI channel, MPE typically uses channels 2 to 16 for individual notes, with channel 1 reserved for global controls. That gives you up to 15 notes of full expression at once. For most people, that’s more than enough—but technically, it’s one of the limits of the original MIDI spec. (MIDI 2.0 will eventually offer more flexibility here, but that’s another topic.)
One of the trade-offs with MPE is data size. When you’re sending high-resolution info for each note, things can get heavy fast—especially if you’re using pressure and movement continuously. Some older DAWs or plugins might choke a bit, and editing this kind of data in a piano roll isn’t always fun. Luckily, MPE-aware environments are getting better at visualizing and managing this data. But yeah—recording with MPE is one thing, editing it is another.
The good news is that MPE is no longer a niche thing. It’s in affordable gear now, and it’s being adopted by more software and hardware makers all the time.
Bottom line? MPE gives you control where standard MIDI didn’t. It doesn’t just change how things sound—it changes how they respond. If you’re the kind of person who thinks about tone in terms of touch, dynamics, or subtle variation, MPE opens a door that regular MIDI just never had.
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