The Striso is a new expressive music instrument with an acoustic feel, which is designed to be intuitive to play and playable everywhere. The sound of every note can be precisely controlled using the direction and pressure sensitive buttons, combined with instrument motion like tilting or shaking. It works standalone, with an internal speaker and battery, and is meant as a self contained instrument with its own distinct sound, but can also be connected to a computer to control other synthesizers. The notes are arranged in an easy and systematic way, according to the new DCompose note layout that is also presented in this paper. The DCompose note layout is designed to be compact, ergonomic, easy to learn, and closely bound to the harmonic properties of the notes.