XILS-lab has released MemoryTone, a software synthesizer modelled on the Memorymoog — Moog's final analogue instrument before the company filed for bankruptcy in 1987. It's a familiar kind of release in 2026, except for one detail near the bottom of the feature list: full MPE support.
That detail is more interesting than it looks.
What's in the plugin
The Memorymoog's defining trait was excess. Six voices, three oscillators each, at a time when most polysynths gave you one or two oscillators per voice. It sounded enormous, and it was famously unreliable.
MemoryTone keeps the architecture and removes the constraints. Sixteen voices, three analogue-modelled oscillators per voice, and up to 18 oscillators sounding in unison on a single note. The filter is a self-oscillating 24 dB/octave ladder. Around that core, XILS-lab has added an expanded modulation section, an advanced arpeggiator, velocity and aftertouch response, and six built-in effects.
It ships as a 64-bit plugin in AAX, AU, VST2.4 and VST3 for macOS 10.13 and later and Windows 7 through 11. Introductory pricing is €79, rising to €199 afterwards.
Notably absent from that format list: CLAP. For MPE players that's a real omission, since CLAP's note-expression model passes per-note data more cleanly than MPE-over-MIDI in several hosts. It's a VST3/AU MPE implementation, which is fine — just not the most modern option available.
The interesting part: MPE on a vintage design
Here's the tension worth sitting with. The Memorymoog had no polyphonic aftertouch. It had no per-note pitch bend. Every expressive gesture you made on it — the mod wheel, the pitch wheel, the filter sweep — applied to all sounding voices at once. That global-gesture behaviour isn't incidental to how those records sound; it's fundamental to it.
Add MPE and you have an instrument that can do something the original categorically could not: bend one note of a chord while the others hold, push pressure into a single voice, move timbre per finger.
Is that still a Memorymoog? Arguably not — and that's the point. MPE support on a vintage emulation isn't a restoration feature, it's an extension feature. It gives you the oscillator stack, the filter and the character, and then lets you play it in a way the hardware never permitted.
This is becoming a pattern. Synapse Audio's Legend HZ, Martinic's Prodigy and several other classic-Moog emulations have added per-note control over the last two years. The recreations have gotten accurate enough that accuracy alone no longer differentiates them, so developers compete on what the original couldn't do. MPE is the most obvious lever to pull.
What to actually expect from it
A realistic note on playing it: three-oscillator Moog-style voices are wide. They're detuned, they're thick, and their whole purpose is to blur together. Per-note pitch bend on a patch with 18 oscillators in unison produces something closer to a controlled collapse than a clean portamento.
That's not a criticism — it's a hint about programming. MPE on this kind of engine works best when you map:
- Pressure to filter cutoff or oscillator detune amount, where gradual movement reads as expression rather than chaos
- Slide (CC74) to a subtle parameter — wave shape, sub level, filter resonance — rather than anything that changes pitch
- Per-note pitch bend to a narrow range, two semitones or less, with a light touch
Save the wide, dramatic per-note bends for engines built around single, clean voices. On a fat analogue-modelled stack, restraint is what makes MPE audible as musicianship instead of noise.
Where it sits
At €79 introductory, MemoryTone is priced to be an easy decision for anyone who wants that particular flavour of enormous. Whether the MPE implementation is deep or shallow is something only hands-on time will reveal — the difference between real per-note routing and a checkbox is not visible from a feature list, and we've written before about how to tell the two apart.
But the broader trend is worth tracking. When a company whose entire business is faithful vintage modelling ships MPE as a headline feature, it says something about where per-note expression now sits in the market. It's no longer a niche capability for people with unusual controllers. It's becoming table stakes — even on instruments designed four decades before the spec existed.
More information: MemoryTone at XILS-lab