Feature request for the Octave buttons

I would like to bring back the LED discussion here. As much as I love the KeyStep 37, the flashing lights of the Octave buttons are very distracting. I saw there are people complaining about that in the old forum for quite a while now, and for me it’s also the only thing that I dislike about the KeyStep.

It would be really cool to have an option in the Midi Control Center, where you could deactivate the flashing lights and choose a constant light instead, just like on the Microfreak. When pressing the Octave buttons, the current octave could be shown on the LED display as a feedback. Or to have different brightness levels for the different octaves could be a solution as well.

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Hey @knarrrz welcome to the Sound Explorers community! :zap:

Thanks for your feedback! We will let to know your request to our KeyStep 37 team.

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Agreed. My premium gaming keyboard has customizable lighting features, so allowing musicians to programmatically reconfigure the lighting on our instruments, at least on some level, doesn’t see as great an ask now as it may once have been.

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I couldn’t agree more. Just a simple option to keep every light on solidly instead of flashing annoyingly. It’s really difficult to focus on playing when the lights are screaming for attention especially in a dimly lit studio. Such a simple thing to fix. Please allow this option!

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I join in. The LEDs need to be controlled by the user.

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Response from support on asking how to disable the flashing on the “Keystep 37”:
“A dimmer brightness setting on the LEDs has already been logged as a feature request and I have linked your ticket to it.”

My response to that:
Many thanks for getting back to me.

The extreme brightness is the lesser problem. The flashing is the bigger issue as it makes it extremely distracting when trying concentrate on working out a melody or when attempting to keep time to a difficult piece.
It would be much better if instead of brightness control, there was just a simple on/off setting such as “[X] Flashing enabled”.

This post fully describes the exact same problem which was present on the “Keystep” model (right-click > play on images if needed to see it in action):

Speaking as a full-time firmware developer myself, a setting to enable/disable flashing instead of adjusting brightness would be significantly easier for the firmware developers to add if you are still using the same 74x595 shift register for the LEDs as in the “Keystep” model.

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I see the Keylab Essentials mk3 has the correct behaviour - octave buttons do not flash.
Could the Keystep 37 be updated to have the same behaviour?

Seen here in an official Arturia video overview:

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