See if you can try the MPE note grid at denser resolutions, and report back on how playable that is?
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Sure. I can’t reference mk1, but I can compare it to my linnstrument. What would be the grid size you’re after?
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Collecting some subjective impressions about touch response when playing melody lines and chords would be a good first test - how is the play feeling, touch consistency, minimal needed pressure, latency etc
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If you get more time with it: A good test would be to have a grid with all notes being the same (or more easily just one very large “key” over the entire surface) and pitch bend being mapped to pressure. Then tap on different locations very lightly and check whether you can reproduce the same pitch. Try this for different pressure levels, to get a feeling for consistency. The ear is usually much better at hearing pitch differences than e.g. timbre differences.
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Good idea. I’ll try to do that.
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yeah, Id echo the above…
can it play reliably on a 3x3 (dots) grid? and is pressure consistent over the entire surface?
also how light a touch are they allowing?
(admittedly this is hard to quantify without having played a mk1)
you might not have an opportunity to extensively test…
but previously, Ive found that velocity can sometimes a pretty good /quick test…, and its easy to tap a few notes around the whole surface, to hear if they sound wildly different.
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4x4 dots is default. This gives you a maximum of six rows, ten columns.
To change this… If you hold down shift while you resize that element in the editor, you can make bigger or smaller cells, which don’t necessarily have to be square. (if you resize the grid to one square, then shift-resize, the whole surface can be one pad. I don’t think it’s a priority to test anything that silly.)
As stated above, 3x3 dot squares are what folks are most concerned with. That maxes out at eight rows, and up to 14 columns – roughly in line with a Linnstrument 128 (whose grid is 16x8)
Beyond that, it’s whatever you have time for.
2x2 dot squares max out at 21x12. It’s a curiosity, but I don’t think anyone has faith that it will be reliably playable that small.
If you went 2x3, everything’s a bit squished, but you get 21 columns – closer to the Linnstrument 200 (at 25x8)
Eyeballing it, I think 4x3 dots is probably a close analog to Push 3 (yielding an 8x10 grid)
You could potentially go “one pad grid”, though I’m not sure why you’d want to.
Likewise, 2x24 dots gives you an octave and a half of Continuum layout. Seems unlikely anyone will spend a lot of time with that, but whatever.
Anyway, you may want to make something vaguely comparable to Linnstrument, to better leverage your internal reference.
Important note within that:
“Vertical Gliss” is enabled by default. Which is great; neither Push nor Linnstrument support bending across rows, and you’ll absolutely want to evaluate whether it’s worth trading CC74 for that. But I think you’ll also want to disable it to test CC74 from the Y axis, for more of a direct Linnstrument comparison.
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Sooo… I went to superbooth yesterday and had a chance to play the controller and talk to the devs a little bit.
My first impressions of the device were very positive. The haptic of the silicon/fabric surface feels much nicer than the hard surface of a linnstrument.
One thing I can safely say is that the sensor density makes a 3x3 grid very playable and even a 2x2 grid didn’t seem to cause any issues or misstriggers, although it becomes tough to play at that size.
The overall velocity consistency was a bit of a different story though. While I could not really test the consistency over the whole surface, I loaded a midi monitor in the ableton session and tried to reproduce the same velocity on one and the same spot over and over.
The results were all over the place, ranging from ~64 to 127. this makes playing finger drums not a viable option at the moment. However, I talked to one of the developers and he told me that that is not a hardware issue, but more a question of how the incoming data is interpreted by the software. The sensor technology is not the limiting factor. He said that currently, they take the first two samples of an input to generate the velocity value, but that there would be a lot of wiggle room to try different methods for reading the input.
I think that the squishy surface also contributes to this issue - depending on wether you hit the surface with your finger nail first or say a softer part of your finger, I can imagine that this makes it harder for the software to know what you actually „meant“ to play.
I could not try the harder surface for comparison and I wonder if maybe they could make a surface that has both a hard and a soft area, so you can have the best of both worlds.
Latency was not an issue.
Playing MPE instruments on the device was a great experience and the surface immediately makes sense when you use it for pressure and sliding around.
Overall I can say that I was very happy with what I saw and felt and that I am very much looking forward to the release.
If anybody has more questions - I’ll do my best to answer them.
Cheers
Edit: I forgot to mention sensitivity. It’s always hard to tell with nothing to compare side by side, but subjectively speaking, it felt very responsive. Hitting max velocity however took a bit too much force for my liking, but that’s not really a concern because that value can be adjusted (hopefully).
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when you were playing MPE… I assume you were using just pressure to control the sounds envelope. did this feel smooth, and also consistent over the playing surface.
velocity, ok, this is true, on the Eigenharp we multi sample for velocity…
theres kind of a trade off here, accuracy vs latency…
depending on update rate/resolution of sensors this is more/less of an issue.
(i.e how long do you have to wait to say get 5 samples to interpolate between?)
my only ‘fear’ in this area is…
this was the kind of thing I’d expected embodme to iterate over during v1, why we expected a few firmware updates - and that did not really happen.
its one thing to say, ‘oh its software, we can resolve that later’, and to actually do it 
max sensor quite hard for full pressure - yeah, thats true of v1, so not surprised about this.
Im not expecting much change on touch… just a bit lighter perhaps.
I do suspect the new surface may help.
the reason is… the existing silicon, has a certain amount of ‘give’ before I think the sensors start getting the data… and its this give/resistence that makes it hard to start a soft touch, because it feels like its not reacting… then it gives, and you are into the touch range.
IF the surface was thinner, and didnt have this resistance, I think the touch would feel more ‘immediate’.
… at least thats my hope.
we will see in September 
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Pressure felt very good, but I think that’s also because the haptic feedback of the surface really lets you connect better with the instrument than a „regular“ hard surface. In the end, that had a bigger impact on my impression than the overall consistency, so although I’d say it felt good, I can’t tell if my experience and your experience would be the same, you‘d have to try it yourself (ofc)
IIRC the dev said the sensors scan at 2000hz (or 20000?) I don’t know if that’s a lot or not compared to other controllers. I think offering a multisampling mode as an alternative for better velocity accuracy would be great, maybe with that scan rate, the tradeoff in latency wouldn‘t be too bad.
To give the devs the benefit of the doubt - they released mk1 just three years ago, so they probably started focusing on the next version not too long after that. I get that that’s not cool for mk1 users, but if I was a developer myself and I knew I could massively improve the delivery of my concept, I‘d probably do the same thing. Fingers crossed, they keep working on the software side for a while. There surely is a lot for them to explore.
By the way I also asked about a hexagon element and he said the plan to add a vertical line offset to the keygrid element. I didn’t think to ask about changing vertical interval as well, but that would basically make all the hex layouts possible.
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A friend of mine played both at last Namm on Embodme booth and reported he felt mk2 sensitivity was better somehow. But it was a few minutes play in a show ….
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it does all sound quite promising…
I think Im still trying to set my expectations at ‘marginal improvement’
from latest update (May 28th), sounds like things are progressing well.
fantastic news … new jog wheel that is flush with main top bar !
if you read above, you’ll see my initial reaction was I hated the original jog wheel design… it ruined the sleek design of the mk1, and look prone to damage.
thats now changed, now its sits flush with main top bar.
Im super happy about this !
shipping , by boat (3-4 weeks) in September.
I’d guess that means in our hands early October.
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Hello, I stopped following Erae II as I (sadky) backed Loom, but what are the news ? I did not see new marketing. Did they ship first units ?
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some delays, minor production issues… so not shipped yet…
last update (early sept) was final testing was underway for pre-production, . no date for delivery, but they will use direct shipment rather than freight to reduce delivery from 5-7 weeks, to 2 weeks.
so they sound close…
Id guess, realistically, its still a couple of months out…
perhaps December?
(so hopefully before Chinese new year becomes a factor)
in fairness, most KS are delayed a few months here, so pretty typical.
but looking forward to it…
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Thanks, if I can’t find anything else good, I might order one.
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yeah, I still have some ‘doubts’ …
once it arrives I’m going to do a direct comparison to the mk 1.
however, my main use-case over the mk1 is the modular (cv) side, so improvements beyond that (over mk1) are a bit of a bonus.
but lets see how they live up to their sales pitch…
a nice continuous surface would be a great addition to the expressive controller landscape.
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Shipping ‘in about a month’ according to their guy at synthfest UK today:
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I am very excited about this development!
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What will the final retail price be?
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799 euros, current pre-order 699 euros
that said… I seem to remember Embodme regularly having discount offers on the previous version. though, that was probably a while after initial release/shipping.
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