Novation SL MkIII MIDI Keyboard Review: Is it a gamechanging controller? (49SL MK3/61SL MK3)

hi this is Novation's SL mark 3 now it's called mark 3 but it's a big departure from versions 1 M 2 and frankly most other controllers and that's because the mk3 has added a comprehensive sequencer in addition to its hardware and dock abilities and the idea behind the SL mark 3 is that all three the dog controller the hardware controller and the sequencer sit behind one interface and blend together into one control center [Music] that kind of integration has the potential to change the game for what is expected of a doll or MIDI controller does the SL mk3 deliver let's check it out okay before I start a quick disclosure Novation invited a few others and me to a sneak preview of the SL mark 3 a few weeks ago and provided this review unit that said this video is my honest opinion and not theirs and while we'll look at what the SL mark 3 can do as usual I'll also look at what it can't do and other products you should compare it to so what is the SL mark 3 well in the beginning there were just MIDI keyboards which means a bunch of black and white keys with MIDI didn't out used to control sound modules or for example the virus no over here but over the years as you can clearly see these things have evolved and the SL mark 3 is the ovations attempt to consolidate as much of that evolution in one place for example just in terms of physical outputs you can choose between two MIDI din outputs MIDI / USB and two sets of note gate and mod control voltage outputs as well as a clock sync output now aside from adding outputs so that you can control more things and more types of them control keyboards are starting to get smarter and they do so in one or more general directions the first way a keyboard can get smarter is to add a sequencer and arpeggiator and your Toria key step is a great example of that the SL mark 3 takes that concept of a built-in arpeggiator and sequencer and kicks it up quite a few notches it has an arpeggiator which we'll go through but in terms of sequencing it has 8 tracks or parts that can be routed out any one of the outputs we talked about before and you can create individual sequences for each of these parts another way we've seen these type of controllers get smarter is to have tighter integrations with digital audio workstations or dawes and the idea there is to bring more functionality from the software onto the hardware controller the mk3 has varying degrees of integration with Ableton Live Pro Tools Cubase logic Reaper and reason and in this video I'll be focusing on the Ableton Live integration finally another way we've seen controllers get smarter is to have the ability to load up pre-configured Hardware templates so that you don't need to map knobs to the right channels manually the idea with these templates is to give me control of the hardware right over here rather than having to reach out and farther out two knobs or sometimes two controls that don't exist on the panel itself before we dive into the details let's just take a quick bird's-eye view of what's going on here you swap between controlling hardware and your DAW using these buttons here when you're controlling Hardware there are eight encoders and 16 buttons on the top row that can often represent multiple rows of functions which you can toggle through using the up and down arrows you've got transport control over here 8 faders which can control hardware or parameters on your DAW and the keyboard has two modes it can be either dedicated entirely to the currently active hardware or you can split it up into zones which can be activated and then you're controlling two or more things at the same time for example in this split I'm controlling my strings here and a piano here both are software instruments on my dough you know and what you saw me do there is a lot of the beauty of the SL mark 3 you can very easily go from controlling a doll software instrument to the subharmonic on over here profit and virus moving on with our bird's-eye view these 16 pads represent different things based on the mode you're in if you're controlling your dawn particularly ableton they represent the session grid and they can be toggled to be used as pens as well and when you're using the sequencer they can represent either steps in one pattern patterns 8 per part or sessions which are states of the entire system so that's the bird's eye view now let's dive in and look at some noteworthy details let's start with sequencing and I think one of the things to keep in mind when looking at a sequencer is not just how powerful it is but also how easy it is to use the basic sequencing unit is a pattern which can contain up to 16 steps so these are the 16 steps for one of the patterns for the virus this is the profit sequence this is the subharmonic on sequence you can preview the notes by pressing them which also lights up a corresponding led and that works well for chords too adding new steps is as simple as holding a new step in and adding notes you can change them and if you hit options you can fine-tune their velocity and gait and you can do that by the way on a per note basis if you like finally there are some pretty nifty pattern features you can change the start and end positions for each pattern you can set the direction to go forward backward ping-pong or move randomly and I think one of the most important and coolest features is the ability to change the sync rate on a per pattern basis what that means is that you can have one pattern running at eighth note triplets or whatever you want quarter notes like it was before another 30 seconds and other at sixteenths so for example in the sequence that I played at the beginning of this review and I'll just clear this pattern out the profit pattern was playing four bars but in a view of one 16-step pattern because it was running at 1/4 of the speed beyond sequencing notes you can also sequence parameter changes so I've got onboard parameter control here which is very useful in the case of the virus node because it doesn't have a lot of knobs now as this is playing I can choose to motion sequence let's say this parameter hitting record will make the parameter changes a part of the sequence and by that I have now added the cutoff to one of the eight automation lanes that you can add on a per part or per track basis you can motion sequence live like I just did or go on a step-by-step basis and change a parameter [Music] now you can parameter lock or motion sequence not just the 16 parameters represented by these knobs but also any of the fader action these buttons the mod wheel and even pedals plugged in the back the only limit is that you can only choose up to eight of those and you can see the active ones in the automation lanes in the pattern options you can see I've already used up one and I've got seven more to go so that's pretty much what you need to know about Aram Automation let's go up one level beyond steps and look at patterns there are two pattern views one is where each row of these pads represents one of the eight patterns that you can have per part and you can scroll up and down between various parts using these arrows this view into patterns is very useful because you can use it to quickly chain or link patterns like this another way of looking at the different patterns is what Novation called expand view you go into it by hitting shift and patterns and now each column represents a different track or part and you scroll up and down to choose different patterns within parts one level above patterns is sessions you can store up to 64 sessions on the controller you can save them into new slots if you like you can change their color if you like unfortunately you can't rename them using the hardware as of yet but you can use the companion components software to do that okay so that in a nutshell is the sequencing part of the SL mark 3 and as you may remember there are two more important aspects to it the hardware templates and DA support the hardware templates are the predefined mappings that I spoke about before where you can map the knobs sliders buttons to different parameters on your various synths to select a template I'll just take a part that I'm not using currently hit shift sessions which goes into the templates and then I use this knob to scroll between any of the onboard templates and you can see that there are about 20 right here so let's say that I wanted to connect a dig attacked that's it and now this part represents the dig attacked and you can have up to 64 of these templates at any one given time the functions of the knobs are displayed on-screen and there are two rows of functions for each of the knobs you can see what the faders do if you move them on-screen right here some have mappings I see many of them don't in this particular template but you could if you wanted to and like I mentioned these pads these pads and the controller inputs are all mapable and as part of a template as well now currently you can't create change or save templates on the controller itself you need to use the Novation component software for that I won't go over its functionality in this review but it's actually pretty comprehensive pretty high on my wish list of features for a future version of firmware if possible would be to create templates right on board using MIDI learn and the ability to rename them now once you've loaded up a template you still have control over which of the outputs it uses you can choose whether the information will be sent out as MIDI over USB which of the two ports it will go out or both and which MIDI channel the information will be sent out on the final big and important feature of the SL mark 3 is its DAW or digital audio workstation control now this will vary somewhat from Dada let's take a look at the integration with Ableton Live once you hit the in control button everything up here represents dock control you're no longer controlling the sequencer the keyboard mapping however remains the same based on which part or MIDI output you've got it set to the faders pretty much work as you would expect as do the mute and solo buttons and the monitor and arm buttons as I mentioned before this grid lets you look into session view and scroll about the grid the device parameters are shown very nicely on this row and you can choose different devices by hitting options you can see I've got three devices here I can swap between them like this so if I wanted to control utility I'm now doing that here now the one thing you do need to wrap your head around when you're using a DAW and an onboard sequencer is that you've got two transports within control node these buttons control the DAW transport and when you're in sequencer mode these control the sequencer transport now you can choose to either sync clock in or out and I found that sync is pretty tight ableton controls the mk3 the other way around it's a little bit spotty I know they're working on that but for now in version 1.0 you're better off either having the transports run independently or have Ableton being the master and the mark three being the slave moving on aside from the three core functions we mentioned before sequencing hardware templates and das support the SL mark 3 has a few more interesting features built in there is the built-in arpeggiator and there are the features that you would expect to see here like directions nice mountain features their sync rates is this pattern feature you can set the rhythm for the arpeggiator it's quite easy to get lost in this one the arpeggiator can either be directed to the selected part or fixed to one of the eight parts and obviously when given one one would want more so a nice wishlist feature would be to maybe have one more page ATAR but there's no word for Novation whether this is coming or even possible but one can hope right another nice feature of the mk3 is its support for zooms what I have here currently is piano strings subharmonic own profit and virus wouldn't it be nice to control all of them at once well luckily you can choose zone i'll set destination part to one and then I can set let say this region here ozone to destination - let's do this here you can overlap zones by the way if you like let's add some more some three part three so for part four sown five part five and let's start zoning so it's doing would say this here and this here and let's go nuts with this oops here once I've defined my zones I can activate them any time with shift zones and control multiple instruments at the same time the final noteworthy feature is scales mode which I activate again using shift and on and this lets you use the keyboard LEDs as lights or guides for various scales you can choose to snap notes to a scale or filter out notes that aren't part of the scale or just use them for display purposes only you choose the scales here there are quite a few onboard scales you can change the root note and transpose a scale as well the final thing I wanted to cover is global settings here you've got both MIDI setting control and analog settings control on the analog side you've got clock pbq and control various voltage levels per output and you can assign which CC will be converted to voltage and sent out the outputs on the back if you're into micro total scales you can calibrate it for that and on the midi side you've got a few more options to choose from I think we talked about most of this so with that I think we covered the important things you need to know about the SL mark 3 let's talk about some pros cons and alternatives I'll start with the cons and I haven't found a much fault with the hardware it feels pretty solid there are 49 and 61 key versions of the SL mark 3 personally I would prefer a smaller version there are smaller versions of Novation's other keyboards so one would think that a smaller version might come at some point in the future but I've not received any indication of that at all from innovation when asked my personal requests is that if they do create a smaller version please make one with mini keys so that we can get a bit more notes than just two octaves on the firmware side you might have other wish list features than me but if my wish list were to be considered here are things I'd like to see that aren't currently here I'd love to see the ability to transpose sequences MIDI learn would be great as I mentioned before so that we can create templates on the controller itself and rename them right here rather than on a computer I'd also like to see non quantized live recording in the ability to micro time step start points right now in terms of start points you're fixed to the grid here and in terms of dog control what I'd really love to be able to do is use these screens as level monitors for the mixer I'm not sure that that's possible in terms of what Ableton will open up in their API but if you could see the levels of the various tracks here I think that would be quite nice as you consider whether the new SL is for you also take a look at Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol artery lab and Ableton's push to a detailed comparison is outside the scope of this video but in general they each offer a tighter integration with their respective software Suites and sound libraries but on the other hand they don't have the standalone hardware sequencing and hardware templates that the SL mark 3 does if you're looking for a controller that can handle a hybrid setup with both electronic music instruments and your DAW in one central place the SL mark 3 does indeed change the game for controllers and sets a new benchmark by which future controllers will be judged if you have any questions about the SL mark 3 please feel free to ask them in the comment section below I'll be looking a bit deeper into some aspects of the MK 3 in the future so hit subscribe and ring the YouTube bell if you want to see more and like this video if it was useful for you and finally please check out my constantly updated ebook about electronic music ideas tips and tricks available to people who support this channel on patreon thanks very much for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: loopop

Views: 274,897

Keywords: 49slmkiii, 49sl, 49sl mk3, 61sl, 61sl mk3, 61sl mkiii, 49sl mkiii

Id: 9uEzJHdW2SU

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018