love my QuNeo 
I saw this today. Love Jordan Rudess. Makes me a bit more interested but he can make anything look good. What I was glad to see was that it seemed to pick most of his hits.
I’m not a Dream Theater fan, but JR pitching gear almost feels like cheating - “he can take a crap, wrap it in tin foil, put a couple of fishhooks on it and sell it to Queen Elizabeth as earrings”.
I do think it’s cool that he seems to have genuine passion in cutting edge tools made by small-time developers though. He was already onboard with the touchscreen-as-instrument thing in the early iphone days, even before the ipad came out.
Isn’t he also the one who did the Win8 video with the tablets? Seems like he’s just willing to sell himself to whoever has the shreddies…
Rudess plays on anything that you shove under his hands. You simply don’t get it back after he is finished 
Rudess is Chuck Norris of keyboardists. Nobody even dares to think about getting the instrument back 
/>. I’m sure that even the instrument itself is so scared of Rudess spiderlike hands, that it won’t ever play simple Am chord, without all kinds of arpeggiated chord progressions again. Even the subroutines of Renoise seems to suffer from PTSD, when i’m trying to sample Rudess music.
Maybe a little of column A, little of column B.
A lot of the apps he geeks out on are probably below his paygrade. I’d also be surprised if other one-man-shops like blip interactive (nanostudio) could afford him, considering he’s done practically no advertising elsewhere. he He also leaves personalized positive reviews on stuff like BitWiz, a bytebeat app … probably has grossed in total just enough to cut him a check if it had to.
I love my QuNeo, although it’s tricky to find a good use for all of its capabilities in one go. The QuNexus looks to be more of the same powerful, compact, bus-powered, MIDI-controller goodness.
But the LinnStrument…
…seriously has me drooling.
Another MIDI controller worth pointing out is the C-Thru Music Axis-64 and its little brother the Axis-49. Both are a bit overpriced, but they’re still a fantastic variation on the conventional musical instrument keyboard. And microtonalists love them.
And Jordan Rudess has pimped them.
One thing that I wonder about with the QuNeo and QuNexus. On one hand I think it’s pretty cool because VSTs today are limited by our ability to control the vast parameter space than anything else. There’s probably entire universes of other sounds one could pull out of zebra’s synth engine if one could control it with something other than pads, knobs, and keys.
However, the thing I wonder about is that most parameters are not per-note. For example, there’s a filter cutoff or lfo rate for the whole instrument, not for each individual note. Thus the per-note parameter control via pressure/position seems kindof mismatched to the capability of most VSTs. To people who have QuNeo’s, how does this work out in practice? How do you make use of those per-note parameters on the controller?
That’s actually part of why I have trouble using all the capabilities at once. It’s tough to figure out what should be assigned where. But, since all but one button on the QuNeo is programmable in any of its sensors, you could duplicate the per-instrument control over as many buttons as you need. Or you could use a split for a multi-timbral VSTi. I’m still working on wrapping my head around mine, but the sheer volume of possibilities makes it so appealing. I’ve actually been working on figuring out how to control an additive synthesizer’s individual harmonics for some nice evolving textures. Or layering pads together and fading in and out between them using a MIDI controller of some kind.
The QuNeo is probably best suited for performing drums and clip launching for Live, but anything you want to control, particularly for performance since the input is not that precise, can be assigned to the QuNeo’s pads, sliders, rotaries, or buttons. You can even assign notes to all of them and play it like a misshapen keyboard. If you really wanted to.
Well, if you want, you can just map, say, every pad pressure to the same CC, and then that works out fine.
Not exactly, because the parameters don’t correspond to the note they’re played on.
For example, if I assigned pad pressure to filter cutoff then played a chord with varying pressures across the note, the cutoff would just jump around and stick at whatever pressure was the last note I played. Sure, you could play it in a way that works (e.g. stick to monophonic parts), but that kindof kills a lot of the reason for having per-note continuous controls in the first place.
Yeah pad pressure in the QuNeo is currently not really properly developed. While the current systems is probably OK for the QuNeo as it is a pad controller, so either will be used for triggering drums or for XYZ controls of parameters, for the QuNexus it is more important that they try and incorporate true Aftertouch. Preferably both Channel Pressure (monophonic) and Polyphonic Aftertouch. Currently you can only set the pad pressure as a CC value, not to Aftertouch/Pressure values.
I’ve also wondered about how well per-key tilt for pitch bend works out. Pitch-bend is a channel message, right? If you’re tilting 8 keys simultaneously, what happens with slight variations or shifts in finger pressure and angle?
Could get messy without some kind of user-configurable input priority.
[edit]
The QuNexus, I mean. 
yeah I’m ordering my QuNexus as soon as they put out a couple more positive reviews, if possible I’m gonna change it so the tilting keys change modulation instead of pitch
Any word on whether this is actually the case (per-key pressure mappable to aftertouch)? If ever there was a case where aftertouch made sense,this would be it.