 In my opinion, a decent MIDI controller keyboard should have quality keys, transport controls, drum pads, lots of sliders and knobs for instrument control and for me, 88 keys. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The hardest thing for me in terms of recommending MIDI controller keyboards that tick all of these boxes has been price. Yes, there's a few reasonably priced ones around but I'm not really convinced of the quality until now. I've been trying out this new Novation Launch Key 88 Key Controller keyboard and I've got to tell you, it ticks boxes. The Launch Key 88 has an 88 key semi-weighted keybed. It has transport controls to allow you to control playback and recording features of your door without needing to use your computer keyboard or mouse. Likewise, it's nine faders and fader buttons give you some control over the mixer in your door but can also be used to control various aspects of the instruments you're using. Further along and in the same spirit, the 16-velocity sensitive drum pads can of course trigger drums and other instruments but can be used also to control aspects of your door's mixer. Above these we see eight multi-function pots and to the left we see a number of buttons used to change settings, a display and our pitch and modulation wheels. At the rear we see connections for a sustain pedal, a MIDI out and the whole thing is powered and connected to your computer via a USB connection. So at the heart of any MIDI controller keyboard is of course the keyboard itself and this one has 88 keys. I think that may be a first for Novation. Let me know in the comments down below if I'm right about that but I think having 88 keys in your home studio, if you've got space, is a massive massive bonus. Of course if you are a piano player of any kind and I'm not any kind of piano player but if you do happen to be then of course it's great to have all of the keys that you would have on a piano available to you. But the second and sort of main reason for people like me is if you're using virtual instruments at all then having the full range of keys becomes a massive bonus because often they have things called key switches on them. So special keys that you don't actually play any notes on which change the sound of the virtual instrument in some way. And that just makes your performance much more expressive and much more natural sounding normally. Now if you have a smaller keyboard then sometimes you just don't have access to those keys without changing the octave or what have you and you can't really simply do that in the middle of a performance. So definitely having all of the keys available is a big bonus. Make sure you've got access to all of them. Now the next thing you want to know about this keyboard is that it's semi-weighted. Now a fully weighted keyboard would have the feel of a piano and if you've ever played a real piano you'll know it has a kind of a heavy feel to it and the keys return up kind of slowly if you like momentarily but slowly. Now the thing is if you go to the other extreme with something like a synthesizer key where they spring up really really quickly okay they've got a very light feel to them. This is somewhere in between. They're not completely light feeling. They do spring up reasonably quickly but yeah they don't have quite the same feel as a synthesizer. If you don't get a chance to play this before you buy it then I want your expectations to be realistic okay and I'm going to say it's more towards the synthesizer feel than the piano feel okay but it is semi-weighted so there's a little bit of a heavy-ish feeling to it. A little bit. So the next thing is is the quality of the keys themselves. Well a Novation have always made good quality keys on the keyboards. I've had a few Novation keyboards and the actual feel of the keys that you know they use reasonably nice plastics and things like that. It doesn't feel cheap okay and they're nice solid feeling keys as well. Kind of make a nice sound as you press them down if you like as well. How sensitive are they? Well it's I'm not a piano player did I say that already? Okay let's have a go. Be fairly gentle like that yeah. I know my G major scale. Be fairly hard with them as well yeah. They feel fine I mean they're nice and expressive and sort of natural feeling so I think everything is okay in terms of the keys. So another thing that's really important to me is transport controls. Transport controls are for the playback of your door. They're going to start playing, they're going to stop play, they're going to start recording and there's usually some other functions as well. For example with this one there is a button for turning the metronome off and on. There is a loop button. A few things like that is what we get with transport controls. It's really important I find with an 88 key keyboard especially because often because of the size of it you can't definitely get it close to your computer keyboard and mouse okay. So just to have while you're playing to have that your fingertips because you're going to make a lot of mistakes yeah there's going to be a lot of stopping and starting if you're like me then it's really handy to have those there. So you can see here if I press play on the transport controls it starts playing and then stop okay. So those are the sort of basic things and I could arm a track for recording. I can actually do that with one of these buttons over here. I'll show you that later so we'll just arm this one for recording and I could start recording by pressing the record button okay and then stop when I finish it. That's what I'm mainly going to be using transport controls for. Now in terms of compatibility I would double check the link in the description down below to look at the product page for this keyboard. I know that they definitely have compatibility with Cubase, with Logic and with Ableton and also I think they mentioned Studio One. Now I've used it with Studio One because it's one of the other doors I actually use in my studio and it was very good. I maybe found a couple of small things that didn't work but they were minor things that didn't really matter. Now I know a lot of you are going to ask me about Katewalk because most of the people who watch my channel are using Katewalk and as you can see it did work there. I was able to play and stop and you know start recording. Some of the other functionality doesn't work but I'll tell you later that lots of the other buttons like sort of faders and things like that actually do work muting so I don't know what kind of thing does work with Katewalk. So if you're a Katewalk viewer then you'll find overall it's pretty good but there are one or two buttons here and there that don't work. So I just wanted to touch upon the sort of multifunctional aspect of most of the controls on this keyboard and I'm primarily talking about the drum pads, the pots above them and the faders and the buttons below those. I mentioned earlier that these faders can be used to control the faders in your door if it's compatible. They can also be used to select tracks or even arm tracks as I'm doing there. The same goes with the drum pads of course they can be used as drum pads which we'll see in a moment. But when they're in session mode they can be used to mute and solo different tracks in your door and the pots above can be used for example as a pan control. Now a really important key on this keyboard if you buy one is the shift key because that gives you access to the ability to change these modes. So for example I'll hold down the shift key and then on the drum pads there's some labels below them. I can switch to drum mode by just clicking on this second one here because it says drum below it and these have now become drum pads okay so I can play the drums with them. If I hold shift again I can go back to using them as controls for mute and solo by hitting on session for example. So there is that sort of multifunctional aspect to the controls and the same of course for these faders and the pots you really often want to be using them to send what it called CC messages to your computer so that you can control instruments in different ways okay. So of course you've got lots of those there to be able to do that so you can get hands-on control of the instruments you're using from the keyboard itself. I think it's really really handy and again because you can record those movements and normally it means that you can really sort of record expression while you're actually playing a part. So for some instruments it's nice to play them on drum pads rather than on a piano keyboard not just drums but some other sort of more percussive instruments as well and we do have these 16 velocity sensitive pads which also have after touch as well and they've got a nice filter I mean in terms of a physical feel they've got this lovely sort of rubberised feel and yeah just feel nice and tactile and they're pretty sensitive as well so you can get some sort of light feel and then louder you know you play your drum parts on there but as I say they can be used for other things. So we've also got some arpeggiator and chord functions on here to sort of help you out if you're not a great player like me. So let's start off with just a quick overview of the arpeggio function so I'm just going to press the arpeggio button on here and we've got some different options of different types of arpeggios available. One thing I'm going to do is switch on latch okay. So latch means that I can just press the keys on my piano keyboard it's going to start to play the arpeggio but I can take my hands off it's just going to keep playing okay so I'll do that. You hear it's playing this it's just playing that little arpeggio. Now as I say we can we can actually change things about it so with the knobs first of all change the tempo we can change this swing yeah we can change the note length with the gate link lots of things in in that sort of way so look there's that's just sort of going up I think there we've got the option to change it so it goes up or it goes down in terms it goes down the chords as you press them goes up and down it goes as play it goes random etc. I'm not really doing it justice but there's lots of sort of arpeggiation or arpeggiation arpeggiator arpeggio features there for you to mess around with. The other thing that I really like is the chord features okay so I'll just switch our arpeggios off what I'm going to do is hold shift here and then on the drum pad I'm just going to go over to scale chord okay so this is where it's got a specific set of chords available within a specific scale and you can see when I press these it's sort of playing some chords there so I've just prepared a little something here I'm just going to arm my track for recording using one of these buttons up here under the photos and I'm going to press record to start recording so if you're not so great with your chord playing I mean that could be a bit of a lifesaver and gets the job done you can also I'll just stop that you can also program in user chords of course so you just hold shift down and then go over to user chords and then all of those drum pads are going to be blank now okay so if I hold one down then play a chord on my piano then that programs that chord into that pad so I've now got that G major chord in there of course I could go ahead and you know hold down the next pad play an A minor yeah and then we've got those two chords yeah and you can go ahead and program in the chords that you're going to need for your piece of music and then just play them there from the drum pads so before we talk about pricing I just want to quickly touch upon the quality of the hardware I've mentioned it a little bit but I think it's worth mentioning I've had novation keyboards before and they always do have a nice solid feel to them and this is really no exception at all the knobs for example they're all rubberized and they have that sort of nice bit of resistance in there you know when you're turning them so they feel really nice the same goes for the faders all the buttons are rubberized and just feel really nice and tactile to use I especially always like the mod wheel and the pitch wheel on novation keyboard something about them they are usually rubberized and they just have that nice really solid feeling about them so overall you are getting you know a good piece of hardware here but the price is also really really good they've told me that when this goes on sale it's going to be three hundred and ninety nine us dollars that's really a good price for an 88 key keyboard which is you know from a good brand and you know the quality is going to be there so definitely recommended by me now before you go if you're confused at all about how to connect things like controller keyboards or maybe synthesizers to your audio interface or to your computer at all then I definitely recommend you watch this video here where I give you a complete guide