How risky of a purchase is the KeyLab 88?

[dtaki]

It seems like the KeyLab 88 is the perfect MIDI controller keyboard for me... however I am held back by the astounding number of issues that I have read about. Is it really that unreliable of a keyboard in the long term, or is this just a situation where the people who post about it are the people who have had problems, and that there is actually a "silent majority" of owners who have used it without issue?

I am hoping to get a keyboard which will work reliably for a number of years to come. The KeyLab 88 certainly has more features than just about any other controller out there, but I'm worried about how reliable it will be, given that I would likely be gigging with it.

[Tausendberg]

I mean, it's a new product, so people haven't had it for multiple years and can't tell you how reliable it will be over a span of multiple years...

What I can tell you, as someone who bought one of the earliest produced Keylabs and then had to RMA it because of issues that it had and I now have one of the later Keylabs, try to get one of the later manufactured Keylabs if you can, because the difference in quality is quite apparent and I'm not gigging with my keylab 88 but I expect that I'll be using my keylab 88 for quite a while.

[Amalgamoth]

When I bought my KeyLab25 I made sure to get 3 years warranty. I had to send it back one time to get another keybed installed.
As with any other instrument much depends on how frequently you are playing it. But no matter what you do, at some point in time any piece of electronic equipment will become flawed.
Buy it, handle with care and get a good warranty. If you don't buy it, you will never have technical problems, but it will also keep you guessing.

[Emporio]

I'm really pleased with mine.  Been gigging it for well over a year and it's been great, very reliable.
Not the perfect keyboard... every keyboard player knows that's the holy grail!  There's some features I hope will be updated or included in future firmware but it's pretty good.

You can't really go wrong for the price, weight and an all round well featured controller.

Ant

[Eric Barker]

The sad reality is that it's far-and-away the best out there for what it is, and pretty much the only think out there. The MPK88 is a back-breaking monstrosity, has a worse keybed, and I hear they have even more technical issues. Aside from that, the rest of the crop is varying degrees of giving up major features. There's the new Infinite Response VAX-MIDI, but it's lacking in faders, you have to build it yourself, and... tbh... it's ugly as SIN.

[Tausendberg]

UGH! Don't even get me started on the MPK88,

I mean, they apparently could not make a keybed that doesn't have manufacturing defects to save their life.

True story; I tried six different MPK88s and every one of them had either a white key on either end that was mechanically defective or they had at least one black key which was electronically defective in that if you hit it rapidly it would cut out. I put way too much effort into trying to find an MPK88 that would work and finally I discovered that the Keylab 88 was coming out so I decided to preorder that instead.

I don't even know who the hell makes their keybeds, I suspect because it's not a named keybed, the MPK88's keybed might have been purpose designed by AKAI in-house.

And yeah, I agree with the rest of your assessment, there are alternatives to the keylab 88 or mpk88 but they all wind up being compromises... like Kawaii with the VPC1 quite literally just took as much of a piano action from an actual piano as they practically could and just stuck it in a box and from what I read in reviews, it feels perfect, but absolutely no encoders/faders/pads, hell the damn thing doesn't even have a pitch or modulation wheel, it really is like an amputated piano.

That's pretty much the gist of it from what I can tell, there simply isn't an 88 key controller that 'has it all'. What I've seen some significantly wealthier people do is that they find an 88 key workstation that has all of the controller features that they want and they just use it as a controller essentially, but that's a very expensive solution.

Arturia, if you're reading this, I wish you guys would release a 'Super Keylab 88'. A keylab 88 but with one of Fatar's really nice wooden keybeds AND motorized faders, last 88 key controller I ever buy.

EDIT: I looked it up... I'll just say that the VAX MIDI looks interesting... I mean, I have fixed a lot on a lot of cars, fixing up a car and selling it is actually how I got the money for a Keylab 88, and by comparison assembling a VAX MIDI doesn't look that daunting at all. It might be a viable business model for them because one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people who build professional studios choose to save a lot of money by buying the parts for an audio console and putting it together and soldering it themselves, so they might have a market for an 88 key that takes 4 hours with an electric screwdriver to assemble.

One thing that's interesting about the VAX MIDI compared to the VPC1 is that just like the keylab 88, it is flat topped, so there is no reason someone couldn't just get some supplemental controller devices to get all the switches, pads, encoders, and faders they wanted. If I had some real money to spend then I would probably go this route, I mean, it's kind of what I'm doing right now, I use the keylab 88's "shelf" to put on a Quneo and a MIDI Fighter Twister for supplemental controls.

[Eric Barker]

Good point about adding external controllers. However, as a gigging musician, it's very inconvenient and a bit risky to have a bunch of external controllers. I already gig with the Keylab, a laptop running a HUGE MainStage Project (draws about 20GB of RAM), Max/MSP running a few patches, a Korg Vocoder, a secondary wireless Keytar controller, and a Wii Remote (for "Whip It"). But thankfully, most of that is connected right to the laptop, so I can maintain control right from there. But I'd be kind of nervous just plugging a whole lot of extras in, what if something fails? It's handy and safe to have fairly blunt "all-in-one" solutions.

[pax-eterna]

Yep another for "ugghhh" for the MPK88 - The KL88 is about the best bang for buck out there!

[Tausendberg]

Eric, I completely agree with all of your concerns and I do agree that when possible it's nice to have fewer points of failure but at the same time as you can see, it's seemingly impossible to find an 88 key controller that 'has it all' and it is kind of a 'you're not going to please everybody' sort of deal.

Like, I know someone who gigs and uses a D-Link. You know, what if Arturia made my aforementioned 'Super Keylab 88' and you know there would be someone saying, "oh but it doesn't have D-Link" or "well, it's cool it has motorized faders but I really wish it had 100 mm motorized faders instead of 60mm motorized faders so I'll just keep what I have and not purchase this product that an equipment manufacturer is spending tens of thousands of dollars to research, develop, and market."

I mean, I don't know if it's the intention of the VAX MIDI, but if it's not, then it's sort of a missed opportunity that they make this 88 key that people are expected to assemble themselves but they don't plan to release integrated supplementary modules for it. I always figured that would be the best long term solution, you know, a custom sort of deal.

Uhm but yeah, without going into my life story, external controllers work well for me because I haven't taken my music outside of my residence in a very long time so I don't really think about it that much and I know a lot of people also look at things in gigging versus studio terms as well... I gotta ask though, you say you bring a laptop with you to gigs, that it's your core component basically, what kind of laptop do you have? I'm thinking of going a similar route one day and my plan is to eventually purchase a high performance laptop (in that way it's nice that the keylab 88 really has that space and that shelf, something the MPK88 didn't think of. I mean, seriously, that shelf is a simple and brilliant idea, expect most new 88s in the future to copy that idea) but my main experience is with desktops. What do you look out for when you pick out a gigging laptop? What issues do you have with reliability? Bloatware doesn't get in the way? That's something I don't like about most laptops, they come with bloatware that's time consuming to completely scrub out.

[Eric Barker]

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro running MainStage (which is absolutely amazing). Unfortunately, the real bottleneck is RAM. I maxed mine out at 16GB, and I notice my projects are already capping the RAM and digging into VM. Worse yet, Apple started soldering the memory into the main board, so you can't upgrade, and to this day they don't offer anything above 16GB, so I'm a bit concerned about the future. Completely unaware of what there is on the Windows end... but MainStage is one of those so absolutely perfect programs (I can't say that about almost any other Apple programs) that I can't imagine switching.

So, I've been using this setup for 5 years now and it's been incredibly flexible and I can do anything to fit my needs. MainStage is highly customizable, and you can use it in any number of different ways, so it's really great at creating your own specific workflow... but it's very deep, expect to spend a lot of time initially building a Layout, and tweaking your workflow. But for someone like me who plays 5 hour gigs twice a week + rehearsals and practicing, that little bit of time and effort is nothing compared to the ease and piece of mind it provides during a gig.

You speak of everyone needing their own specialized setup, ABSOLUTELY. Keyboard isn't like guitar, where pretty much everyone speaks a dialect of the same language, talk to 5 keyboardists and you have 5 completely different workflows with different needs. Hell, I had to write my own Max/MSP program to act as a midi channel router for the way I like to perform. I gig with a Wii Remote and a vocoder (among other things). I've used my iPhone to control Max patches onstage before (now I use the Wii Remote), so Bluetooth and/or WiFi? Absolutely.

At some point I'd like to do a few YouTube videos demonstrating how I use my Channel Cycler app (which basically allows me to setup "Virtual Keyboards" the way computers have "Virtual Monitors" and switch them on the fly), as well as the WiiMote trigger, which I use to play "Whip it" these days, but I can use to do all sorts of interesting remote triggering. If you're not familiar with Max/MSP, and you're into creative workflows for synth performance, I HIGHLY recommend looking into it.

[Tausendberg]

Thank you for the leads!

[OhMeadhbh]

Hell. I can't even get past the registration page. They apparently sent me a keyboard with an invalid serial number / unlock code. Arturia is a company that is far from detail oriented. They even forgot to put a USB cable in my box. Not a big thing, but it's supposed to come with one, just sort of a demonstration of how they're not paying attention.

So... my Arturia is a 40 lb paper-weight in the shape of a keyboard. Maybe I can get Amazon to let me return it.

[OhMeadhbh]

So I had to return mine. Thankfully Amazon agreed to accept the return.

It's kind of sad, I would have loved it had it worked. Just super ticked off about the bait and switch with the AnalogLab software.

[Tausendberg]

Ok, dude, you gotta dial it back. Hundreds of people have bought Keylab 88s and not had this problem. I don't even work for Arturia but "sorry you had this experience."