Thank you!
A clerk I used to be friendly with at one of Tokyo’s larger musical instrument dealerships told me half of them arrived from the factory obviously broken and they ended up with lots of returns. These days they don’t sell any Behringer product at all.
Update: the “sorry you felt offended” apology has been taken down
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People don’t dislike Uli Behringer because he makes cheap synths. They dislike him because of all the shady things he does like making personal attacks on journalists and astroturfing bullshit about Robin Hood.
Which acid? Sulfuric, nitric, fluroantimonic?
What would be a good keyboard controller to start out with? I don’t need 88 keys, but it would be nice to be able to doodle out melodies.
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Not sure about that, but in the US you have to actually use the mark in trade to keep it. It’s not a legit mark.
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The Arturia Keylab series looks pretty nice. I’ve been eyeballing them for a few years, as I wouldn’t mind a keyboard controller with a decent number of knobs and sliders myself.
The question is, I’m not sure if they’re that great or not.
This little one seems decent, for a couple hundred bucks:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/KeyLabEss49--arturia-keylab-essential-49-keyboard-controller
It gets a pretty decent review here:
This is the step-up, which seems pretty sweet:
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That is a bit tricky to answer because there are a lot of factors why you would pick one over another, and what is good in one situation can be bad in another.
In general, though, I think key actions that have some amount of resistance to them are easier to play than keys that have no resistance at all, because there is more tactile feedback. It’s harder to fat finger or accidentally brush your hand against a key and activate it.
If you are aiming for a USB midi controller for the computer you might want to confirm it can be changed to USB class compliant mode if it has a bunch of extra features because at least the basics will work with OSes like iOS, Android, etc and if you are still using it in 8 years some new OS version and the manufacturers unmaintained proprietary drivers wont leave you SOL. Even a basic class compliant controller should be able to have its sliders, knobs, and pads send standard MIDI 1.0 cc messages and note events and mod / pitch. Also, some controller manufacturers tried to get fancy with auto mapping and plugin integration but some DAWs and plugins have easy / quick cc mapping modes that actually work better just supporting the standards. It just gives you more options if you can use the controllers fancy stuff when it actually works but also disable it if needed. It can be useful to download the manuals for a few you are looking at and do the somewhat unfun / tedious work of skimming them.
When looking at keyboards that have less than 88 keys, it is extremely useful to have buttons to quickly shift the “window” of the current octaves higher or lower, and this becomes more and more useful the less keys you have.
I don’t use computer oriented MIDI controllers anymore, but one of my controllers is one of those little keysteps, and based on the build quality I assume their DAW controllers are probably worth looking at, but I had a cheap oxygen for a while for my first controller and it did the job. Although I’ve seen two MAudios have their USB-B get flaky after a while which gets annoying. Not sure if they’ve improved this since their earlier models
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Yup, the old “let’s turn perfectly good hardware into landfill” problem. Thanks for reminding me of that little detail. Also, since I’m a Linux guy, hardware support can be a problem (but if it is supported, it stays supported for a long time).
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It CAN be, but you generally need to have the initial cooperation of that person, then you can retain the trademark against their will if the business relationship dissolves. In this case no, probably not, at least not in the US.
Now I just use simple, narrow-depth keyboards that have MIDI DIN out, which is super stable, durable, and easy to hack DIY connections for as it is a simple high / low 5v serial bus. My current primary one was designed to be used with a modular synth format I don’t use and has a high quality full-sized key 61 key keybed with channel pressure and the entire bottom is solid steel, and will probably last me decades. Unfortunately it has no MIDI-capable pitch / mod expression, but oh well. It has two MIDI DIN input connections and at some point I want to make my own DIY pitch and mod wheel inputs to plug into that. For now I use a wireless trackpad for computer-based interaction and I have a few hardware synths without keyboards and all the controls for them are on them.
The DC-2W is expensive, but is really, really cool on synths.
It’s really, really cool on EVERYTHING. I keep it on mixer aux channel like a reverb
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