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.
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