Keylab Essential 88 MK3: Best full size controller on a budget?

got a new keyboard here from artua the keylab essential 88 they sent this over for me to make a video on I'm not getting paid to make the video but they still send this stuff to me so that's why I put paid promotion at the beginning as always when I do these videos I make them just so that you guys can find out certain features maybe features that you won't find in other videos and help you make the decision whether this is the right keyboard for you almost everything that applies to the 49 or the 61 Mark III is going to apply to these keyboards the thing that differentiates this one is the keys are actually semi-weighted and so if I pull out my 49 here you'll see that we've got these different types of keys on this one and the keys are much more jelly these keys they have that slight resistance and they just feel a whole lot better when I'm comparing this to the complete control Mark II keyboards there's something that you need to be aware of with these ones these ones are MP enabled that means they have midi polyphonic expression and these keyboards don't have that so that's a pretty cool feature and you can press down and you can press down further and then you can get some extra controls on the sound that you have now the problem with that is these new keyboards don't have as much of a throw for when you're pressing down on the Note whereas the kyab essential doesn't have after touch but what that means is you get a little bit further throw on the key itself when you press it down and then I got to say that's one thing I like better than the complete control keyboards and I find myself when I play on these keyboards my velocity control is not as good and it's probably because I just have a little bit less of a key to actually push down so there's always a sacrifice for these kinds of things and so for me right now I like the keys of this one better when I'm playing something like a piano or just playing anything that I want to control Dynamics you know like putting in some string parts or something like that and then I'm going to go to the Osmos anytime I need actual after touch because with this one you have a whole lot of throw for the after touch so you have way more control over whatever aftertouch is hooked up to whether you want to have polyphonic aftertouch or just regular old aftertouch this thing is where it's going to shine and I'm sorry for bringing that up because it's super expensive and it's not what we're talking about here but you realize that there are certain tradeoffs to try and get all of the different features packed into one keyboard I like the keys of this one and to me that's what this is all about is getting a full keyboard 88 keys I don't know if you guys have noticed but in my studio I've only pulled out an 88 key keyboard like maybe once or twice in the The Last 5 Years of YouTube videos and what I plan to do with this keyboard is kind of just have it off to the side and every time I'm actually getting into a real composing streak or working on a soundtrack or something like that and that's going to be my go-to for any of my very specific piano playing needs so with that out of the way it's kind of like the rest of this functionality what you need to do is go obviously watch the videos that they're going to post or you can just go look for videos on the key laab essential Mark I other keyboards and you're going to find all the information that applies to the things you can do with the dog control and controlling your mixer controlling effects and stuff like that and the truth is right now I don't have the script that works with qas so I can't even really show you the dog control with this version that I have here I tried working with the 61 Mark II uh script for qbase and it just doesn't work let me know if you're interested because once they have a script for qbase for this 88 key version I'd love to do a little video that goes over how you could use this and integrate it with the software itself so is this all going to make a huge difference for you that depends you might be somebody who loves that kind of Hardware control it also comes with a ton of software comes with analog lab V and 2,000 patches with that now something to be aware of with analog lab V is there's a big difference between analog lab V and and the analog lab Pro that you would get if you had the V Collection the analog lab V is like a $200 purchase I'm not sure if that's Canadian or us but you know something like that $200 for this software and that comes with this keyboard when you get it in terms of looking for sounds this browser works really nicely which is new compared to you know the Mark I versions of these keyboards or the Mark 1 versions but yeah you go through I can go look in the keys folder and then now I'm in the subfolder of keys you can see that so we got low five Keys mallets plucked Keys okay let's try that one so I'm going to hit the [Music] clav and then let's just go look over at the soft for it just for a second I want to give you one little tip with the software and I have no way of showing you just the analog lab V patches because I'd have to like set up a different account or something like that because you're going to see all of my patches which are something like 177,000 patches and that includes pigments and every scent that comes in the V Collection so there's just so much stuff but the way it works here is you've got this home button gives you kind of an overview of patches and you know you got a couple of patches that pop up can Browse by the instruments that you have if you have the V Collection as well as sound banks that you can purchase a bunch of them come for free then we've got the explore button and that's probably where you're going to spend most of your time what I would do is just click on types and then you're going to see the the main categories the same thing you're going to see on the keyboard and then you know choose something like a classic synth pad and now all you're seeing in the browser is classic synth pads and then you can put a little heart on it double click a patch [Music] and then I can give it a little heart right here and then of course the heart pops up on the software and so on so we're going to go to the type and we'll go to electric piano and we'll go classic EP and then we're just going to go through a bunch of these and just find something so once you've got your patch of course one of the things you want to have a look at is the sliders and the knobs and if we look over here once you've loaded your patch you can get out of the browser view so again this this little guy right here is your browser so to get out of that to see you know what these are all assigned to you got to click this little button right here if anybody knows a way to do that from the hardware so I can close the browser from here please write it in comments because that feels like something they need to have on there so that I don't have to go over to the mouse to see these controls pop up on the screen anyways once we've got that you can see we've got nine knobs and nine faders so a significant amount of control over each of these patches and we look up on the screen of course we can see we've got brightness tamber and so on and then we can choose how much of the [Music] base how much of the trouble now with these sliders here you're going to have to to catch wherever it is so you can see amp drive right now the fourth one in is near the bottom and my slider's at the top so all I got to do is move the slider down you'll see a a black sort of background that's where the fader is at that moment slide it down as soon as it catches that other point now you're controlling it so it's kind of a nice feature it means that that you're not going to accidentally jump something to the wrong spot as soon as you touch it because it's in the wrong spot and these knobs themselves are endless encoders so what that means means is if we look at the master you can see it's way over at like 3:00 if I start turning it just picks up where it is that which is a beautiful feature the faders feel really good the knobs have almost too much resistance in my opinion there's a lot of resistance [Music] there and you can see that as soon as I start touching something it'll show us what we are actually controlling on the screen so in that sense I guess you don't really need this guy popped up but I still feel like you want to look and see what kind of things you actually have control over without just starting to fiddle with all those knobs as I mentioned in my 49 key there is the ARP mode the chord mode the scale mode let me just show you something that's really cool that I showed in that video as well if you hit the scale mode and hold it down you're going to get one of my favorite features of this keyboard so we are going to release that and we're going to change the the root note here so I hit the type and then we're going to go to D Minor so watch what happens when I play note so we're in D Minor okay that's cool but I don't know if you noticed but I played all white notes let's go even further with this uh let's go now to C minor and try that [Music] out so again playing all the white notes if I take scale mode off you see I'm actually playing a C major scale C minor is much more complicated three Flats three Black Keys If I go back to scale mode now it's on C minor it's like totally cheating [Music] right so all you have to do is get really good at playing on the white notes okay just practice that scale C major and then now you get to choose your key and it's going to confine all the notes that you're playing into the key of C [Music] minor okay and then let's see what happened with the midi that I just played so if we look at what I just played in qase you can see that it's playing c e flat G a flat all these black notes even though I didn't play them which is really cool so it's actually sending midi that's in the proper key to your Daw okay so the last thing I just want to show you really quickly is setting up the keyboard in these pads with something like battery so I've already got a kit loaded but let me load a new one just to show you what that might look like okay that one sounds nice but here's the problem got some cool sounds but I want my kick and my snare right here let drag this kick over to this slot and just swap that one I'm going to drag the snare over to this one I'm going to drag the closed high hat to this one and the Open high hat to that [Music] one and again in a future video what I'd love to do do is just show you how you can make your own templates cuz not only can you use the templates they ship but you can make your own templates for certain plugins and for this case I'd probably want to make a template for battery so I have you know different colors of the pads and and then let's just talk about the pads feel these pads feel really good there's not a ton of resistance but they are very they're velocity sensitive pretty good control over the velocity sensitivity I'm sure that's something we could play with with in the software as well anyways we've got a simple little little beat in there let's drop that [Music] in Okay so now let's load up a base patch so I'm going to uh actually let's go back to types base and then we're going to go to uh subbase [Music] nice we'll try a different couple different [Music] patches cool patch now remember I'm still on C minor so all I have to do is play the white keys let's try recording that one [Music] in and then let's just add one more we're going to go to leads there we go and then let's go to soft lead [Music] all right so you're now just a pro soloist by just playing all the white notes right pretty cool stuff okay so that's my very quick overview of the new kyab essential 88 hopefully once I get the keybase script I can do a little more detailed video on what you can do to control the software because there is a lot of control in here and it's something that I think a lot of people might really use and I feel like that's the point so thanks arteria for sending over and thanks for watching the video see you in the next one

Channel: Jef Gibbons

Views: 5,697

Keywords: Arturia, Minifuse 4, Cheap DAW, Free plugins, Ableton, Guitar Rig, Autotune, Hip hop producer, Synthesizers, Synthesizer Basics, Audio engineer, Digital Audio, Compression, FX, Cubase 12, Maschine+, Maschine, Native Instruments, Best Interface, Class Compliant, Bus powered, V Collection, Analog Lab, Roland Juno, Studio Basics, Studio tour, iPad music, Dawless, Ableton Live, Ableton Push 3, Push 3, Keylab Essential MK3, Keylab Essential, Controller Keyboard, Keylab Essential 88

Id: V8TSfdfAX38

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024