Things were further improved when I determined the appropriate velocity and aftertouch sensitivities for my playing style. When I first started playing the KeyLab 88 in earnest, I wasn’t a huge fan of its Fatar keybed but, as it started to loosen up a little, I found myself becoming more comfortable with it. This is a nice touch, especially when the keyboard isn’t connected to a computer. Having done so, I was able to save up to 10 maps as presets within the KeyLab 88 itself, which allowed me to use whichever was appropriate for a given setup.
I therefore found it much quicker and easier to create configurations using the MIDI Control Centre software. Many times I intended to change values but instead found myself whipping through menus, to the accompaniment of much swearing in the wilds of Cambridgeshire. However, as with all products hosting parameter access editing systems, detailed configuration can be a bit clunky. Initial setup couldn’t be simpler: just connect it to your computer using a USB cable and most if not all soft synths should recognise it and add it as an option in their MIDI menus.
On the bright side (and that’s not a pun regarding white and black keyboards), the KeyLab 88 weighs just 13kg, which makes it much more manageable than some of the 76-note keyboards and workstations that I still use, let alone the 88-note back-breakers of just a few years ago. With its polished wooden cheeks and uncluttered design, the KeyLab 88 is an attractive unit and, while I’m not a fan of white keyboards on stage, Arturia have already released black versions of the KeyLab 49 and 61, so maybe a black 88 is in the works. Behind this, you’ll find the standard Arturia complement of knobs, faders, velocity- and pressure-sensitive pads, switches and transport controls, together with pitch–bend and modulation wheels, octave up/down buttons and a volume knob.Įditing is carried out by two further knobs and three buttons that interact with the menus displayed on the 16x2 character display. It doesn’t boast an escapement action, but its touch is quite acceptable on a product designed for a range of playing requirements, especially since the firmware now offers 10 velocity curves and 10 aftertouch curves to tailor its response. The KeyLab 88 is an 88-note master keyboard with a velocity- and aftertouch-sensitive, piano-weighted Fatar keybed. I was finally able to play the KeyLab 88 as nature, and Arturia, had intended. This detected the KeyLab 88 and, after updating itself, allowed me to modify the pedal input so that ‘off’ was detected as MIDI CC 64 value 127, and ‘on’ as value 0. So I updated the firmware and ran Arturia’s MIDI Control Centre, which I had first installed when I tested the company’s Analogue Experience products some time ago. Sometime later, a third was dispatched and, upon its delivery, everything seemed to work correctly except that I had lost one of the updates that had been present on the second unit - the sustain pedal was again inverted. So, like the first review unit, the second was soon winging its way back to France. Hitting them considerably harder squeezed a maximum velocity of around 15 from them. To be more accurate, they were not dead, but hitting them as hard as you would to elicit a MIDI velocity of 127 elsewhere on the keyboard resulted in only silence. In common with several purchasers who wrote to various forums, I discovered that the keyboard had a bunch of dead keys, in my case spanning from A7 to E8. When this arrived, tests revealed that they had addressed the major issues but.
Discussing these issues with Arturia revealed that the company were already working on updates, so we agreed that they would supply another unit as soon as they felt that the bugs had been ironed out. For example, the velocity response was unpredictable, and I couldn’t use a standard–polarity sustain pedal with it. I first received a KeyLab 88 immediately upon its release, but it was clear that there were problems. It’s unusual to review a product after it’s been on the market for this long, but in this case, there’s a good reason. A fully-weighted master keyboard at this price is unheard of.