AKAI Pro launch the Advance Keyboard Series for VST, AU ...

[rod_zero]

It doesnt matter if you dont have 100% control of the synth, 75% would be enough as long as that 75% is at the tip of your hands.

[rentboyrenton]

I stand corrected, and even though it looks great, i have much better things to spend £470 on lol
I shall wait until they are half price next year

akai stuff rarely gets down in price, maybe a little but only after a few years - the first gen mpks are barely cheaper than the second gen that came out like what 7 years later?

[Big Tick]

So, since this is based on Zen, will users be able to migrate back to Zen when this product fails on the market like Kore and all other "everything in one" proprietary systems?

You could I guess, but it is so much better than Zen that you definitely won't want to do that. All the formats and technologies are the same than in Zen, so there are no proprietary closed formats there - the presets are fxp files, the database with the tags is sqlite...

It says it can load "all VSTi" and I find that terribly unlikely. Receptor fails at it. But I guess the Akai software is native, not WINE based. What about VSTi on Mac? Is it loading only Mac VST into the AU environment, or is there indeed emulation to get Windows VSTi plugins to run under the AU plugin host?

Yes, of course, hosting is native. It won't load windows vsti on a mac.

[Aiynzahev]

This is actually a really cool idea, and I will pass it over to Akai.

Thanks.
I've been banging on about it long enough..!

In my opinion Advance / VIP is more designed with performance / playability in mind.

Sure, I like the potential of this and what they are doing is cool. But, as yet, however clever it is (and it's certainly looking better than previous attempts at this) it's currently another generic box with a small amount of generic knobs that can control a small selection of parameters that I can no doubt manually order plugin by plugin - and I have enough other things that already do that.

Get me a flexible synth layout, and it puts software synths back under my hands, with labelled dedicated controls always in the same place, and enough control that I can feel my way through synths osc/env/filter etc. Of course, these controls can also be used for other things when controlling a non-synth plugin. A more expensive controller would have some system of labelling controls through displays instead of panel graphics and this would be even more flexible.

I guess some kind of layout somewhere along the lines of a Roland JP8080 (bit less busy perhaps) and where the issues surrounding flexible handling of various plugin implementations/architectures have been considered and some decent solutions made. It's not a trivial problem, but I think it's one that can be done with some acceptable compromises - and a lot less compromises than 8 generic rotaries we currently get now.

I've had this in my mind for a while, and while I haven't thoroughly solved the problem of course, there are lots of ways of tackling this and I have some solutions lurking around. Things like having physical controls for one oscillator, and an oscillator select button - now we have a set of controls that can handle an arbitrary number of oscillators. The controller would know how many oscillators a given plugin has and configure itself accordingly.

It's not like we need physical controls for everything, but the layout has to be labelled, *be consistent across plugins*, and make sense. My filter cutoff, resonance, envelope, oscillator levels and so on should always be in the same place, regardless of what plugin I use. There are solutions for lighting up active controls (in a similar way Roland's System1 does it) and lots of these kinds of things - I'm convinced there is a viable product here if it was really thought through and implemented well.

I shall await Namm 2016

What your proposing would be a lot more interesting to me too. It would be something we don't have right now but we've wanted for a long time.

[bungle]

I stand corrected, and even though it looks great, i have much better things to spend £470 on lol
I shall wait until they are half price next year

akai stuff rarely gets down in price, maybe a little but only after a few years - the first gen mpks are barely cheaper than the second gen that came out like what 7 years later?

I shall go without then, nothing groundbreaking here for me really, just GAS

[bmanic]

One company should get this finally right and release a keyboard with 16 knobs and 8 faders.

One company should finally get it right and actually THINK about the amount of controls needed for a typical synthesizer.

2 Envelopes, ADSR = 8 knobs/sliders. What they always forget though is that you also want to assign the Envelope Amount / Depth control too!! This means each ADSR will ALWAYS take up 5 controls!! Nobody.. and I really mean NOBODY has ever got this one right. It's like corporate monkeys are designing these things. They always get the actual amount of controls wrong.

Then there's the case of master volume usually not being considered (some do get it though).

Thus my only choice at the moment is still the age old Novation SL series of keyboards which at least have enough controllers so that I can get a semi-decent setup done.

[Crackbaby]

Can it load vst3 (ie roland aira 101 and sh2) and be used as a vst2?



Big grats Big Tick! It must have been really fun to work on this project. You have no idea how glad i am for not having bought a controller as i had planned. I especially love the "fu" to native instruments for allowing all vsti's to be used and not just "komplete" The knobs look gorgeous! For what you get i don't think it is expensive. Maybe it's been answered, but when will it be available (in Europe)? After NAMM i take it .. oh i hope it wont take too long!

Have you planned it to work with iOS somehow? Not sure how that would work though. Not sure what i even mean by it I think im mainly thinking of feedback but im not sure many iOS synths/hosts/effects support that unless it's for the mixer (Auria). Forget this question, it became too confusing lol

[EvilDragon]

VST2.4 only.

[beely]

So yes 100% control is totally possible and already almost exists.

By the way, some synths that can be100% controlled from hardware: Sylenth1, Poly-Ana, Spire, impOscar, Minimonsta, Oddity, Diva, ACE, Bazille (almost!), Electra2, Gladiator, TAL synths, Dexed, Arturia's new Matrix 12, Korg Polysix and Monopoly, Largo, Axon, lots of Reaktor synths. These are just ones off the top of my head. Things even allow automation/mapping of things like arp steps and modulation matrix source and targets.

You misunderstood what I am proposing.

100% control of all synths with a consistent layout is not possible - you have to do what you are suggesting, screens full of parameters and generic controls, and we have ways to do that already (and there are more ways to do it than the ones you suggest).

This is about *dedicated* knobs. You cannot, for example, have a dedicated envelope section that works 100% with all synths because different synths have ADS, ADSR, multistage, complex loopable envelopes and so on. Having dedicated controls will always be a compromise, but done well it would be so much better than what we have now.

I have zero desire to page through sets of 8 parameters for a synth that has 2000 parameters - and it doesn't matter how many ways there are to jump to given pages - all this kills the workflow.

It doesnt matter if you dont have 100% control of the synth, 75% would be enough as long as that 75% is at the tip of your hands.

*Exactly.*

[aMUSEd]

Arturia's new Matrix 12

Really? It's one of the few synths that have completely defeated me in creating a template for it in Kore, the param assignment is irrational, you assign a knob but when you turn it it does something completely different. I thought it was buggy but you say it can be controlled? How?

[beely]

One company should finally get it right and actually THINK about the amount of controls needed for a typical synthesizer.

Yeah, these kinds of things are what I mean when I want this done properly.

To be honest, the state of "controller" keyboards has been so bad for so long, I'm amazed no one has come up with any alternate solutions - particularly the one I've had in my brain for ages.

For a controller product, you basically want three main categories for most people - controlling mix parameters (levels, pans, mutes etc), controlling plugin effect parameters (compressors, eq's, delays etc) and controlling instrument parameters (envelopes, filters etc).

What we end up with at worst is a few generic knobs and switches we can manually assign to things, which may or may not work on any given plugin and which require you to manually remember what each generic control for each plugin does - horrible.

At best, we have a few more controls, and a screen or digital labels to remind us what the control is, but the controls are still generic and we have to page through to find the control we want before we can use it.

I want a synth layout that is consistent, controls the most important parameters, has some extra flexibility built in to cater for a few non standard parameters (there are ways of doing this) and has some intelligence in the software end to build and adapt for special case plugins where necessary - hopefully this would all be done by the developer but this is a fast moving world and it would be nice to tailor things for individual users' setups in special cases.

You could have a companion product to do the same thing for compressors/eqs etc but those things are a bit easier to handle than synths.

[Echoes in the Attic]

So yes 100% control is totally possible and already almost exists.

By the way, some synths that can be100% controlled from hardware: Sylenth1, Poly-Ana, Spire, impOscar, Minimonsta, Oddity, Diva, ACE, Bazille (almost!), Electra2, Gladiator, TAL synths, Dexed, Arturia's new Matrix 12, Korg Polysix and Monopoly, Largo, Axon, lots of Reaktor synths. These are just ones off the top of my head. Things even allow automation/mapping of things like arp steps and modulation matrix source and targets.

You misunderstood what I am proposing.

100% control of all synths with a consistent layout is not possible - you have to do what you are suggesting, screens full of parameters and generic controls, and we have ways to do that already (and there are more ways to do it than the ones you suggest).

This is about *dedicated* knobs. You cannot, for example, have a dedicated envelope section that works 100% with all synths because different synths have ADS, ADSR, multistage, complex loopable envelopes and so on. Having dedicated controls will always be a compromise, but done well it would be so much better than what we have now.

I have zero desire to page through sets of 8 parameters for a synth that has 2000 parameters - and it doesn't matter how many ways there are to jump to given pages - all this kills the workflow.

I agree that 8 parameters at a time is not enough for hardware control. However 24 controls (like 8 sliders and 16 knobs, or just 24 knobs) plus additional buttons (like the SL has another 32 buttons per page) could work really well for 100% control. Because like I said, with that many buttons, every page is just one button press away potentially (if they wised up and implemented that). Very few synths would need more than the available 24 controls X 32 pages (32 buttons available to jump right to a page).

I understood what you meant, I just don't agree that dedicated controls helps at all, exactly because controls are always different. I'd rather an LCD tell me if there is an ADSR or an ADR, and in the case of the latter leave a knob unused on that page. All dedicated controls would do is remove a display that can change for labels that do not. It is unlikely that it would be in any different layout that groups of 4/8 anyways. I don't see why someone would want controls labelled as ADSR when that should be able to be something different on a different page. If you want a simple cut down layout that would actually be able to be labelled permanently, it's very easy to build that layout on something like the SL. Making the layout permanent just doesn't help I don't think.

[EvilDragon]

I think that the perfect layout is 9 sliders plus two rows of 8 knobs above it, plus two rows of 8 buttons between them. This gives you 8 channels+master channel control (with mute/solo, and knobs can be pan and whatever else you want), or 9 sliders for Hammond sims, or just about anything else you want.

But it'd have to be motorized faders in that case, along with endless encoders. Buttons should have multi-color LEDs.

[Echoes in the Attic]

Arturia's new Matrix 12

Really? It's one of the few synths that have completely defeated me in creating a template for it in Kore, the param assignment is irrational, you assign a knob but when you turn it it does something completely different. I thought it was buggy but you say it can be controlled? How?

Strange, the knob assignments seem rational to me. For the first ever, they've actually made every single control available. Every menu item, button, even the preset selector. Even the display of which parameter is showing it's modulations in the display page. That's one thing that might be confusing. When you click a parameter and show it's 6 available modulations, these are actually named in the host parameter as what slot they are in the full modulation matrix, not what number of the 6 slots for that parameter, if that makes sense. So you could click on filter cutoff and assign it's slot one to LFO3. But if you already had other modulations, it might actually be assigned to mod slot 4 for example, which you can see in the mod matrix. so the mod source and amount would say mod slot 4 source and amount. That's the only potentially confusing thing, but if you think about how the mod matrix is set up, it makes sense. The display in the middle is just showing all the modulations from the mod matrix targeted at that specific control.

I actually think the way they set up the matrix 12 is great.Finally. Unfortunately I also happen to think it is their most underwhelming synth yet. Quite a lot of cpu but nothing special soundwise for me.

[Echoes in the Attic]

I think that the perfect layout is 9 sliders plus two rows of 8 knobs above it, plus two rows of 8 buttons between them. This gives you 8 channels+master channel control (with mute/solo, and knobs can be pan and whatever else you want), or 9 sliders for Hammond sims, or just about anything else you want.

But it'd have to be motorized faders in that case, along with endless encoders. Buttons should have multi-color LEDs.

Agreed. Pretty close to Nectar Panorama actually. Except where they fell short compared to the Novation SL is that they only have 8 buttons below the knobs, whereas the SL has 16 on each side.

Motorized faders would be nice but will always make something pricey. I'd actually be fine with all 24 continuous controls being encoders. Or perhaps the 8 sliders being touch sliders rather than physical. Then all controls don't have to jump.