Today, Arturia announces their newest synthesizer, and the newest member of the Brute family: the Polybrute 12, their most ambitious analog instrument to date. Doubling the voice count of the original Polybrute, the Polybrute 12 is an ideal tool for deep soundscapes and lush textures. All the most important features are still there: three oscillators per voice, dual filter architecture with Steiner filter and ladder filter for every voice, three envelopes, three LFOs, end-of-chain delay and reverb, and of course, the wildly deep modulation matrix.

So What's So Special About FullTouch?

The last several years, we've seen a (quite welcome) resurgence of polyphonic aftertouch as a control method on commercial electronic musical instruments. All but abandoned since the 1980s heyday of synthesizers, polyphonic aftertouch is a famously significant feature of such classic instruments as the Yamaha CS-80, Sequential Circuits Prophet T8, and the New England Digital Synclavier II—forming a significant part of these instruments' characteristic sound. However, from the '90s to the 2010s, it became increasingly rare to see polyphonic aftertouch as a possibility in new instruments, despite its expressive potential.

Its re-arrival came in several stages: from the development of early MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) controllers, the introduction of the ASM Hydrasynth (with its own proprietary approach called Polytouch), and the introduction of a Fatar polyAT-capable keybed have all signaled that interest in polyphonic aftertouch technologies has been growing. Now a staple part of instruments from ASM, Waldorf, and others, we expect that exploration of traditional polyphonic aftertouch will continue.

Arturia's FullTouch keyboard represents a big step forward—they are a large company demonstrating interest in pushing expressive gestural detection to new depths, and indeed, we haven't seen an approach quite like the Polybrute 12 keyboard in any instrument aside from the boutique Osmose, developed by small French company Expressive E. So, what is Full Touch, and how does it differ from conventional polyphonic aftertouch?

Let's start by talking about how synthesizer keyboards usually work. Let's think of an individual key on a synthesizer as being, essentially, a type of switch with two states: on and off. Most synthesizers can, through fairly simple methods, detect the speed at which the switch is engaged (a parameter which we commonly call velocity)—but aside from that, the key really only produces two distinct detectable states: on, and off. On most synth action keyboards, the key is only considered to be "on" once it has been depressed a fairly significant amount: it takes quite a bit of travel downward before the synthesizer engine will acknowledge that you are, in fact, pressing a key.

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Traditional aftertouch is based on detecting the amount of pressure applied to a key after that specific threshold has been breached. Essentially, you've already pressed the key, and it is physically in the lowest position it can possibly reach. By applying additional pressure, an extra sensor can transmit data about how hard you are pressing: this is how aftertouch is defined. In an instrument with polyphonic aftertouch, this type of data can be detected from multiple keys simultaneously, and can be used independently to affect specified parameters of the voice(s) that the key presses each instantiated. This allows, of course, independent expressive control for each note that you're playing: you could use individual, per-finger pressure to sweep the filters of each voice independently, to speed up LFOs, and so on.

The thing is, aftertouch only works once the key is fully depressed. But...what if the entire travel of the key could be detected? What if the continuous displacement of the key could suddenly be leveraged as its own expressive control source independently from traditional aftertouch?

That is the key question that Arturia's FullTouch keyboard sensing method seeks to answer. Indeed, this keyboard can detect continuous vertical displacement, and gives you access to its full range of pressure sensing in a variety of ways. Specifically, there are four specific types of sensing available on Polybrute 12:

• 1: Monophonic aftertouch
• 2: Polyphonic aftertouch
• 3: FullTouch AT
• 4: FullTouch AT>Z
• 5: FullTouch Env>AT

The first two modes are simple enough: they provide typical synth action response, with monophonic or polyphonic aftertouch. These should provide a familiar playing response, and should translate perfectly well to the types of patches you might make on other keyboards that leverage these types of expressive control. But, FullTouch is where things really start to open up and offer new possibilities.

The final mode, FullTouch Env>AT uses the keyboard's detailed position sensing in order to detect a variety of aspects of how you're interacting with the keyboard. In essence, rather than keys simply triggering the synth voices' envelopes, you instead can use your interactions with the keys to define, in real time, how the envelopes respond. By detecting the keys' instantaneous position and deriving a sense of velocity by assessing their change in position over time, the keyboard can be used to effectively define envelope shapes intuitively and expressively. This is a bit difficult to explain—however, the basic idea is that the envelopes suddenly will respond to even very fine details in your playing, creating sounds that, for a synthesizer, are uncommonly responsive, nuanced, and natural-sounding.

New sensing types aside, the custom keybed in Polybrute 12 differs from most synth keybeds in a variety of ways: the keys don't exhibit lateral "wiggle"; additionally, they're much longer than usual synthesizer keys (i.e., they extend further into the body of the instrument). This results in a somewhat more sturdy and piano-like feel—truly, a more high-end, rugged feeling than most typical synth action keyboards. It is capable of transmitting MPE data, and as such, can act as an excellent controller for external software, sound modules, etc.

And of course, let's not forget that Polybrute 12 is also just an excellent-sounding synthesizer. It would be well worth the investment even with a standard keyboard; however, the new possibilities presented by Arturia's FullTouch technology will no doubt help to find new levels of nuance in an already great-sounding, well-thought-out sound engine. So, if you're just looking for a polyphonic analog synthesizer, it immediately comes highly recommended. If you're also looking for a new, intuitive, and surprisingly immediate way of engaging musically with an electronic instrument, it will likely prove to be exactly what you're looking for.