Oh? That’s quite sad!
Let’s hope you get what you were wishing for.
To be fair, it’s a tradeoff we were asking for. Software updates aren’t that inevitable.
Lovely screen the size of a watch-face to squint at on stage when there’s a whole chuck of white emptiness to the left, the size of an iPad.
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1600 Euros is a decent price for what you get. But software-wise I would expect V Collection included. But it is not.
No poly aftertouch, that’s a shame, while I’ve no need for a stage instrument, if they haven’t put it in this, it kind of lowered my hopes of it appearing in the next version of keylab
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Yeah I’m thinking that too. I’m thinking my next controller won’t be an Arturia. It’s not like there aren’t choices.
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It sort of reminds me of the minimalist direction NI have gone for with their S series.
Faders would have been nice, especially for playing organs live.
That display is very gimmicky and I certainly wouldn’t get on with its small size
I would love to find out what’s under the hood, I suspect it’s like the Kronos where you basically have a PC (Kronos used Intel D510MO motherboard with a dual-core Atom D510 running at 1.66GHz),
I sold my Kronos for one reason, boot time, it was like booting the slowest PC ever. I’d have an idea, turn the Kronos on, by the time it had booted, idea was gone.
Wonder how long it takes to boot this up?
Just noticed it has a light guide, I like that
Don’t get me wrong, if I still gigged and my eyesight was as good as it used to be, this would be awesome
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Good question. According to Loopop’s review, loading patches can take a while (though, thankfully, the patch you were using before switching still rings while the next patch is loading).
Agreed! Several people in the chat were asking about MPE and MIDI 2.0. If Arturia isn’t even getting the modicum of expressiveness afforded PolyAT, on the controller side, one has to wonder why they support MPE in an increasing number of softsynths.
Basically, despite how vocal their Keylab users have been in interactions around this announcement, it doesn’t sound like Arturia is investing enough R&D on the controller side.
I get that there might be issues with adding PolyAT to the semi-weighted keybed they want to use. Otherwise, MiniFreak would do PolyAT.
Thing is, though, there are other ways to go expressive.
As my keyboarding skills are quite bad and I’m no fan of pianocentrism (understatement), I really wish Arturia could explore a broader diversity of controller types. Two of their devices use square pads (BeatStep and BSP). That could lead them to work through grid-based controllers, like Ableton’s Push line or Novation’s Launchpad line. (Among other options.)
Better yet… they could release a desktop synth and let people bring their own controllers.
Having said all this…
This new hardware synth does fit the overall lineup and goes some way to explain their strategy over the past several years. We expected hardware/software integration. There’s something about DAW integration, given how Analog Lab Pro and V Collection work. It’s not too surprising that they went with a keyboard, even though it calls for comparisons with better keyboards out there.
And, y’know, standalone hardware has important advantages. One is that we won’t have to fear software updates. Those who were fearing subscriptions got the opposite: these 10k sounds should remain on the device even if you don’t upgrade your VC license. Besides, Adam Neely’s experience with software issues on stage, documented through gig vlogs, is shared by a number of people. Dedicated hardware is also useful in terms of being “distraction-free”. It hopefully boots quickly. And this hardware is probably sturdier than most laptops.
The fact that USB-C only does MIDI does surprise me, given how useful it could be to have the device as more of a “plug out”.
Not exactly sure why it does Bluetooth audio.
EDIT: and Bluetooth MIDI, according to Peter Kirn. Guess I didn’t find the right page in the manual
The fact that it does WiFi, including as a hotspot, which only works as a way to manage presets and such “because MIDI over Wi-Fi is still unreliable”? 
It’s 10kg (22lbs.) and rather bulky.
Loopop keeps talking about the limited number of hardware controls.
While I understand why they felt the need to build this specific product, some of its awkwardness relates to the form factor. Again, this would have been awesome as a desktop synth, without a controller. Hopefully much more compact than just taking away the keyboard.
At any rate… I’m neither disappointed nor pleasantly surprised. It’s the kinda thing I was expecting, though I was hoping for something less pianocentric.
I’m relieved that they didn’t announce a subscription or some AI features. The DAW predicted by a number of people could have been interesting… under specific conditions (such as hardware integration).
Of course, there was a bit too much hype around the event. They could have managed expectations a bit more. (Did this thread contribute to the hype? If so, sorry. Honestly, though, we were mostly talking from personal perspectives, not hypers.)
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I’m really really trying not to be negative but I’m struggling. What we got was:
- A 61 key performer keyboard with Analog Lab built in, and has already been stated, how long before it’s no longer compatible with new versions of Analog Lab?
- Tiny screen in the centre of the top panel, the size of a watch-face. Not at all practical on stage.
- Poor ergonomic design where even the product demonstrator had to reach awkwardly across with his left hand to access all the macro controls, which stupidly are all on the RHS of the top panel.
- Huge wasted space the size of a small Caribbean island on the LHS of the top panel, which would have been better utilised for faders, or the macro controls, or I know, a BIG TOUCHSCREEN that we can ACTUALLY READ and would have been an integral immersive part of the user experience, instead of relying on the user pairing the keyboard with a phone app.
How can they launch a product in 2024 that’s basically a modernised version of a 20 year old Arturia Origin, but with a WORSE SCREEN and UX?
I’d love to know what user groups they approached to actually research this product, beyond their short list of nobodies they paraded in their video who have been paid to endorse it. Did literally none of them mention the glaringly obvious shortcomings I picked up from just watching a video?
It’s a thoroughly half-assed product that’s been well conceived but very poorly implemented.
Other opinions are of course available.
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Agreed. As it looks, the display looks a bit cheap on first glance… but no judgement until proofed! Knobs look ok but as for the simplicity, I think extra faders would have been more confident. Perhaps Arturia is doing this on purpose, to later launch special “control surface” for extra synth controls…??
So… if we go back to Keylab88 Mk3 I suspect Arturia is not in a hurry there. For me, the MkII version still seems fully acceptable compared to many other controllers similar. On the whole, this was a surprise because I mentioned in some other thread that “maybe they’ve been working on a keyboard with built-in AnalogLab”… I wasn’t far from it!
AstroLab is obviously an aim for a new market, for those already using AnalogLab without Arturia’s Keylab controllers or surely for those who are using Keystep controllers and want to upgrade etc. They want to extend their market share, understandably. Price seems acceptable, but then of course some sacrifices… If you look at it… having built in 34 iconic synths from 60’s to 90’s… DAW-free operation possibility, 61 key, semi-weighted keybed w/aftertouch, wooden sides (maybe it’s not, looks like that…) but at least metal housing… well, it’s not that bad. Also, instant connectivity to iPad and/or smartphone via app.
From the TV/monitor today, the display looks “strange”… even cheap. Maybe it’s fine but who knows… time will tell.
Simulated wooden end panels, most is metal, tops plastic.
Only channel aftertouch, not polyphonic.
While I have a vague idea someone tried this in the past, what someone really needs to release is a keyboard controller with a built in Windows or Mac PC.
Fully upgradable so we can add new motherboards, storage etc.
Either a large pop up screen or the ability to stick a 10” plus tablet on it.
Then we could load whatever software we wanted from whoever.
Obviously it’s more complicated than I’m making it sound, but all it would really need is custom software that maps our music software to the various controls.
As others have said, the danger with releasing this type of keyboard (Astrolab) is that as PC’s get better/faster at a silly rate, we could find ourselves in 5 years time with Arturia releasing a synth that while still very good, would have been much better if they didn’t have to make it fully compatible with the Astrolab.
The motherboard and CPU in the Kronos was already considered to be very old before Korg even announced it.
Maybe I’m being a little over critical? I wish Arturia all the best with it.
For me personally, I want as many knobs and faders as they can physically put on something, I like to control parameters while playing. There appears to be 4 instrument knobs, 4 effects knobs and a volume knob, well they’re beating the knobs on my S88 mk3 from NI by one.
I bought my second synth in the early 80s, was a second hand 61note Korg Trident, that had something like 45 knobs and 30 buttons
I first started to get disappointed by the Roland D50, great synth, but you had to fork out money I didn’t have to get the programmer for it. DX7 was another minimal buttoned synth
Then the Korg M1. I really hated the direction everyone was going with few knobs and having to wade through dozens of menus to change something.
Things seemed to be changing for the better this century for example Roland’s system 8 with its 49 key having (quick count from picture) 56 knobs, 14 faders and over 50 buttons.
I have Native Instruments S88 mk3 as I have their Komplete collectors edition, but I’ve said elsewhere that while I do love my S88, I find myself using my Keylab 61 mk2 more and more for tweaking the sounds, I’ve also said if NI released a new controller with the large screen showing useful info (rather than 4/5 being taken up with a picture of the synth I’ve selected) and with the controls my Keylab has, it would be my perfect controller.
But my S88 mk3 actually has less buttons than my s61 mk2 had. Not counting the buttons directly above the screen, the mk2 had 32 buttons and the mk3 has 21
What worries me is it seems to be the latest trend. Have 8 buttons controlling macros and the users will be happy. My fear after watching today’s launch is that Arturia might also be going down the less is more route.
Having 8 buttons controlling macros can of course be a lot of fun, but there’s other times where for certain synths, I need far more.
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That was exactly my first thought too; that encoder display is awful.
For a stage keyboard, how do they expect someone in the middle of performing to select a preset on that tiny screen? Anyone over 40 is gonna be like “nope, can’t see!”.
The screen moves because you have to click the encoder to select items, making it even harder to use.
The icons in the menu rings are super-small.
When a preset is displayed, the available display area is mostly used to show a needless background image and a picture of the synth model(s). That background image often makes it even harder to identify what the synth model image even is.
Changing macro values are shown as a small value at the very bottom of the display, when that should be the most obvious information at that time.
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…And this is why you don’t speculate people. You will almost always end up disappointed. Don’t punish yourselves like that.
That’s not always true though. Speculation threads only lead to disappointment if the mfr is out of touch with the user needs. Time will tell if that’s the case here.
25 years ago performer keyboards looked like this: my beloved Technics KN7000 which I’ve owned for 23 of those years, with a big information-rich widescreen LCD display, 61 keys, channel aftertouch (which was state of the art at the time), and buttons for everything:
…but the current trend is minimalism, and navigating through menus on pinhead-sized screens in the name of form over function. Which for me is a crying shame, but for some I guess it’s just what they wanted. For all my cynicism, Arturia must have undertaken customer research to prove there’s a sufficient market for it. It’s 100% not aimed at me anyway.
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Indeed. And there’s an overall strategy behind this release. It feels like they’ve “dropped the other shoe”.
What remains to be proven is how effective their user research has been. Sometimes, organizations conduct thorough research with a wide enough diversity of users… and end up developing products which do little to address user needs.
As an aside… (Feel free to skip)
(Disclaimer: my current dayjob is as a Senior UX Researcher and I’ve been conducting field research for 26 years.)There’s a lot to be said about what I’d call “unthink”: the moment at which people stop the reflective process. It’s the kind of “shoot first, ask questions later” moment yet it often comes after there’s been a lot of reflection. It relates to focus and execution, in some ways… paying little attention to how things interact with one another. The opposite might be systems thinking.
Unthink isn’t necessarily a problem. And it’s typically not laziness. A sense of urgency is more likely at stake. In terms of the (in)famous double-diamond of design thinking, it’s “early convergence” (as opposed to late divergence, which might not be better). More specifically, when it comes to product design, a lot of “unthink” has to do with solving the wrong problems.
Soooo… In Arturia’s case, it’s quite likely that they’ve been focusing on solving the problems they’ve perceived in this small Music Tech niche and solutions that were compatible with their “Unique Value Proposition”.
In some ways, Analog Lab has been the lynchpin of a strategy they’re executing. It’s not their flagship product. In some way, it’s almost a Trojan Horse.
It sounds like there’s been quite a bit of attention to interaction design (IxD) in the process of getting Analog Lab to where it is now. And IxD is part of User Experience Design (UXD). Chances are, the team behind Analog Lab used research findings to make decisions about interface elements. The performance mode has a certain elegance and people who use it can probably attest to a satisfying experience. As with “progressive disclosure”, one can go from this performance mode to the nitty-gritty of editing the patch in the softsynth’s own GUI. Pretty clever.
Music Tech commentators often praise Arturia’s approach to navigating patches and that browser is a core part of Analog Lab. (I personally find that it’s a far cry from what would be most useful. That’s another issue.)
We now have Analog Lab in hardware form.
Browsing patches is way more difficult on this hardware than in software, so that part of the design didn’t work, for some reason.
In terms of controls, there’s a certain logic to limiting the device to a few macros.
The way Analog Lab works, limited controls are both a benefit and a reason to upgrade. If you don’t own a given softsynth, you can still leverage patches created for it without worrying about the details. Macros are already mapped, if you have a 'Lab controller. (For some reason, there aren’t profiles for the 'Step line in AL’s MIDI setup). This is all before MIDI-CI becomes a thing.
Speaking of MIDI-CI… It wasn’t mentioned during the launch and it’s not in the manual. The whole idea of integrating hardware and software is rather prominent in the MIDI-CI part of the MIDI 2.0 specs. In a way, MIDI-CI can apply a similar logic to Analog Lab between devices from different manufacturers (which is the point of a standard). It’s also like NKS, in this respect.
Now… Where did Arturia go wrong, then, in terms of controls?
The logic is there. You tweak the patches at home and you bring them to the stage on this “portable” device. Switching between two personæ in the same person. You go from sound explorer to performer. The performance mode is there for you, with playlists and such. You don’t have to do menu diving on stage because you’ve prepared everything in advance. If there’s an issue, someone (doesn’t have to be the performer) can troubleshoot using Wi-Fi, including with an app for Android and iOS. So far, so good, right?
“But I want more controls during performance!”
Ha! You’re not our target persona, then.
And we go back to the notion of splitting the controller from the sound generating device. You, performer who wants to use multiple controls on stage, could use a more elaborate controller (including one from the 'Lab line) and plug it into a “sound module”, maybe even a rackmount one (as my penpal was pointing out). You still get the benefits of a dedicated device instead of an all-purpose computer. Some controllers are much more compact than a piano-style keyboard with full-size keys.
Which leads me to another point related to controls and controllers… Even though there are Analog Lab patches from Pigments and many other softsynths which support MPE (and MTS-ESP), this controller doesn’t even have the expressiveness of the MicroFreak. The whole idea of using macros is predicated on the notion that you make tweaks to the overall sound design. Indeed, very few of the 15k+ patches I have in Analog Lab respond to PolyAT and many don’t even respond to velocity. If a device is meant for performance, it should probably have controls which we’re likely to use in performance. Do people play the brightness knob during a lead solo the way Steve Winwood plays the pitchbend wheel? Maybe. It’s something you can test during user research. Is that use of the knob satisfying enough for players? There are ways to tell, and it’s not a survey.
Alllll this to say… There probably has been an issue within Arturia in terms of addressing user needs. It might not be because the whole team is “out of touch”. It could be because the people who were in touch with users weren’t heard by people who were making decisions.
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Agreed. It feels unlikely to me that literally none of their UR candidates picked up on what I think are glaringly-obvious UX faux-pas such as the teeny-tiny screen and all the macro controls being on the far right while a huge empty space the size of an island sits uninhibited right above the player’s left hand. But here we are.
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Precisely! Someone (UXR or not) must have raised flags and someone else said « non ». Is it a cost thing? It might have been the justification. Yet it’s quite likely that there was a cost-effective way to make things work.
The blank space itself might be due to some technical constraint if there hasn’t been enough communication between people so that user requirements and technical requirements would match.
I mean, some may consider that space a very obvious sign that something went wrong. Others just perceive it as a space to put stuff. Given the size, it affords being a bed for a cat.
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Do they do proper research though.
Take NI.
One of the things you had in their mk2 keyboards was full integration with their Maschine hardware.
When NI released their mk3 S series controller late last year, there was complaint after complaint over them removing this.
NI’s response was that according to their data, very few people used it. Person after person responded that when given the option of sending usage data etc back to NI. They always (me too) turn it off.
Then there was something else to do with editing their nks data, can’t remember the details at the moment, but as few people used it, they removed it. What they failed to realise is, those few people used it to make tons and tons of 3rd party synths etc nks compatible and while it’s probably true that only a few people used this, the results of those few peoples hard work were used by tons of people.
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Personally I would have thought that getting a small circular screen designed and made, would cost well over 10 times the cost of using a rectangle screen.?
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