Arturia KeyLab Essential 49

Keyboards for every taste

The French company Arturia is well known for its emulations of synthesizers and keyboards. In its assortment you can find dance music classics like the Yamaha DX7 or Minimoog synthesizers, classical instruments like the Hammond organ and even Don Bukla's modular synths. The beauty of these emulations is in a single shell Arturia Analogue Lab, which, for example, allows you to change instruments on the fly and has a set of already configured macros for each particular patch. All this not only simplifies the work with these keyboards, but also adds fun to the process.

Brain analogue lab

What about KeyLab Essential 49? The fact is that the keyboard is sharpened to control all this goodness - no fuss with MIDI mapping, turn it on and play. In addition to the Analogue Lab, the user also receives a "fat-free" version of Ableton Lite (which can then be upgraded to a full-fledged Ableton at a discount) and a UVI Grand Piano Model D, which is a sampled Steinway concert grand piano, with the keyboard.

Advanced command centre

Thanks to the 4 octave format, the keyboard turned out to be large and almost all the controls necessary for the producer were placed on its top panel. Formally, they can be divided into 4 blocks: a pad block, a transport panel for DAW control, an Analogue Lab control block with an LCD display, and a main synthesizer control block with 9 rotary encoders and 9 faders. It is worth noting that the drum pads here are not quite ordinary and work as additional keys for switching octaves, presets, or include a multimode that allows you to control two virtual synthesizers at once. They can be tied to the traditional control of the sampler, but for hardware beats they are not the most convenient here.

Quality keyboard

You can't fault the quality of the keyboard block: the keys are tight, but pliable (sorry for the oxymoron), they have a natural movement dynamics. They have high sensitivity, standard size and support for aftertouch. In general, compared to the previous generation of keyboards, the guys from Arturia have done some serious work on the bugs. Plus, a Chord mode has been added, which allows you to play chords from 3 to 10 but with a single key. And the price at the same time remained at the most democratic level, which makes KeyLab Essential 49 one of the best options on the market in terms of price and quality ratio.