Like the way you can expand and shrink the 4 octave Hydrasynth ribbon to 2 or 6 octaves.
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Wow, beyond my expectations! 2 and 3 octaves, the lateral slider, the action zone… Well thought, well marketed. And the crowdfunding price points…
The video makes evident that this ribbon has way more depth than the Omega’s, making it more of a controller on its own indeed.
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Yeah ! Backed !!
Yeah, I told myself I wasn’t going to back and yet here I am backing a three-octave. This is a really well-prepared launch.
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In case you feel limited by your Osmose !
Expressive E was saving this place for them.
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What I need to decide is, is this and an Omega Keys a duplication for me.
ADDED : Plus i have a Hydrasynth Keys.
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Same, except with the two-octave. 
Also:
You can send a specific MIDI message to enter developer mode, where every input will be sent as-is, and you’ll be able to control the LEDs and display by sending MIDI SysEx messages to the Loom from your own program or script running on your computer.
This is one of those details that I personally won’t use but that increases the seduction I feel for a product. “Hackable” devices attract tinkerers, and then unexpected things may happen.
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Even if you don’t get fancy with this, making simple changes to existing layouts may make a lot of sense.
For instance putting your own choices of specific chords into the strum mode could be very useful.
I wasn’t sure when I first saw it, but more I watch, the more I thought it looks good.
yeah, I think it be a nice addition to an Osmose… not sure Id balance on the levers 
the only question with these things, is how accurate/sensitive the the touch is, as you can’t tell this without trying… and we’ve seen a lot of ‘variability’ of this with past mpe controllers.
Im also a little surprised, given its Aodyo, they didn’t put a synth engine in, to make it standalone (as well) … feels like a missed opportunity.
overall, Im tempted… but just backed the ET 2, and really dont need yet another controller
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Stepping out of my musician shoes and into my music fan shoes, I’m pretty excited where the next generation of synth players takes all these things once we get past the wobbly overdone vibrato show off stage. Funny that we had all this with the theremin at the start of electronic music and then we just normalised and quantised all the human expression away.
I like getting feedback from instruments so I think this static wood thing is out for me but excited about the future of all of this in a world when the vast majority of keyboards don’t even have poly aftertouch.
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Counterpoint: synths took the piano and made mod and bend standard. So we’re still ahead of the game, expression wise.
Continuous surfaces like the loom are always welcome additions, though.
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Another odd counterpoint is that I still don’t quite understand how my piano is the most expressive instrument in my house as if it were a synth it’d have terrible specs!
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I wish I could get excited about most of these MPE instruments but yeah the lack of any defined tactile feedback is what kills it for me too. Maybe if I tried one I’d feel different but based on my pure unbridled hatred for touch screens I can’t imagine it going too well. I think this looks better than most of them though, if for no other reason than the organic textured surface. And I feel much more inclined to play with tapping on hard surfaces than pressing into squishy material.
I’d love to see stuff like this but with clever haptic feedback tech of some kind.
Finger drumming.
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I’m totally in.
I pledged for the small one as the best complement to my big-ass Continuum. The Continuumini wasn’t able to fill that role, and the Loom looks worth a try.
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A few observations:
First, just noticed the two-octave version is the “loom”, but the three-octave one is the “looom”. Delightful!
Second, after watching the Swam video, I’m feeling a little underwhelmed by the Z-sensitivity of the ribbon. It looks like it might be sensing the area of the touch (how much you squish your finger) rather than actual pressure. But then, real pressure sensitivity seems to be what the “action zone” is for, so its inclusion makes more sense. Mapping that to swam’s expression and using the ribbon just for x- and y-sensitivity will probably work well for these instruments.
But that’s not going to work well for polyphonic things where you want pressure for each finger (like poly-AT stuff). In that case the Z-expression of the ribbon will have to do. Looking forward to more demos/details on the range and responsiveness of this dimension of the loom.
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Yeah that is what it is. It’s like the MicroFreak. Both use capacitive sensing ( aside : likely Aodyo is using the Cypress / Infineon capacitive sensing chip ), so it doesn’t sense Z axis force per se. There are other technologies that do, like that used on the Sensel Morph. Not sure what is being used in the “Action Zone” ( aside : that sounds like a description from a groovy 1967 movie ), but maybe that’s an FSR.
The Omegas also have a microphone as does the Phi that can be used with an envelope shaper to do other control. Not sure if that is part of the Loom. It is an inexpensive way to do a velocity sense. You’d need some software to coordinate the two sensings in a polyphonic controller, though that seems doable.
Just my impression, the finger smooch area thing would work OK for polyphony, though the Sensel Morph ( from experience ) will likely still be better.
BTW : The wood surface is part of the capacitive design in this instance, i believe.
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Yes, I decided to downgrade from a three-octave to two-octave Loom because of this realization – I think it will work very well as an expressive monophonic option, but I’m less likely to get the “hang” of this surface-as-aftertouch approach (based on other synths I’ve used that employ a similar method), at least in a polyphonic context. It’s just not… how I use my fingers across a surface without some great deliberation.
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