Ben Osterhouse — a sound designer better known for orchestral Kontakt libraries — released his second plugin this week, and it's an unusual one. Note Sampler is a MIDI plugin for macOS and Windows that records MIDI clips onto individual keys of your keyboard, turning the instrument into a playable sketchpad.
How it works
The workflow is deliberately minimal. Select a key, hold record, play something, and that phrase now lives on that key. Press the key and it plays back. You can record live or step-record, edit afterwards in a step editor, set a custom loop length per clip, and overdub onto existing snippets on the fly.
The point is to replace mouse work with playing. Instead of dragging clips around a DAW timeline to test whether idea A works over idea B, you assign both to keys and play them against each other. Clips can be key-snapped so they stay in a chosen key, and clip-launch quantization keeps combinations locked rhythmically.
Two features push it past novelty. The first is that the remaining keys still play normally — load loops across C0 to C1 and the rest of the keyboard remains a live instrument, so you can perform over your own sketches. The second is resampling: play a combination of loops plus live material and capture the whole thing back onto a new key. Layer that and you're building arrangements by performance rather than by editing.
There's also a cascade mode stacking up to three virtual keyboards in one instance, where notes played on one trigger recordings on the next. And a MIDI monitor you can drag into your DAW at any point to recover something you played and liked.
It's $29, VST3 and AU, native Apple Silicon and Intel.
The expressive angle
Here's where MPE players should pay attention, and where the honest answer is "not yet."
Note Sampler records notes. It does not currently record MIDI parameter data — which means per-note pitch bend, CC74 timbre and channel pressure don't survive the round trip. Play a phrase on a Continuum, an Osmose or a LinnStrument into Note Sampler, and what comes back is the pitches and the rhythm, stripped of the articulation that made it worth playing. Synth Anatomy's write-up flagged exactly this, noting the hope that MIDI parameter recording arrives in a later version.
That's not a criticism of the release so much as a description of where most MIDI utility plugins currently sit. The tooling ecosystem around MPE has a persistent gap: arpeggiators, chord generators, humanizers, loopers and MIDI effects were nearly all designed for one-note-per-channel MIDI, and passing MPE through them tends to collapse or scramble the per-note channel assignment. It's the same reason MPE-aware MIDI FX remain a short list, and why tools that do handle expression correctly — Bitwig's note FX chain, some Max for Live devices — get recommended so often.
Using it anyway
None of that makes Note Sampler useless in an expressive setup — it just changes where it belongs in the chain.
The most practical placement is as a sketching tool, not a performance capture tool. Use it to find the note material: try a bass motif under three different chord voicings, test whether a countermelody fits, build the skeleton by ear rather than by drawing. Then drag the result out via the MIDI monitor and perform the final pass on your MPE controller, where the articulation actually gets played.
It also works well in the other direction, for composers who write on a weighted keyboard and articulate later. If your process already separates "what notes" from "how they're played" — a common workflow among orchestral writers, which is presumably where Osterhouse's instincts come from — then a notes-only looper isn't a limitation at all.
For players who want articulation preserved through a looping workflow today, the alternatives are DAW-native: Ableton Live's session clips and Bitwig Studio's clip launcher both retain MPE data in recorded clips, and dedicated hardware like the Bela Trill-based recorders and MPE-aware sequencers such as the Squarp Hapax handle per-note data properly at the cost of a less immediate workflow.
Worth watching
Plugin releases have been relentless this year and most of them are variations on existing ideas. Note Sampler isn't — the core concept of recording loops onto keys and playing them against live material is genuinely fresh, and $29 is a low bar for finding out whether it changes how you sketch.
If parameter recording lands in a future update, it becomes something more interesting again: a looper that captures gesture as well as pitch. That's a version worth asking for. The plugin is available now from Osterhouse Sounds.