Arturia MiniLab MKII

Virtual soloist for virtual studio

The MiniLab MK II is an interesting two-octave MIDI keyboard with pads and rotary controls. Perhaps the main charm of Arturia MiniLab MKII is its integration with Arturia software. This French company is well known for its near-perfect emulations of classic organs, pianos and synths like the Yamaha DX7, Buchla Easel V and Minimoog.

The best collection of virtual instruments on the market

In total, there are more than 20 instruments in their collection and they are all combined into one convenient shell Arturia Analog Lab: there all instrument presets are in one place, and the main controls are immediately configured for each preset. Arturia MiniLab MKII allows you to immediately connect to Analog Lab without dancing with a tambourine and easily control all this goodness, switching from a conditional modular synthesizer to a Hammond organ on the fly. With any other MIDI keyboard, each time you have to fiddle with MIDI mapping.

Wealth of settings

The additional controls of the MiniLab MKII are different from most similar MIDI keyboards. For example, 8 drum pads are not quite ordinary and work as additional keys for switching octaves, presets, or turn on the multimode in Analog Lab — then two halves of the keyboard control two different synthesizers. It is also convenient to control the sequencer in the Arturia Spark drum machine with pads. In general, there are an unprecedented number of options for customization, so changing the RGB lighting when switching modes helps a lot. Pads can be tied to traditional sampler control, but they are not the most convenient for hardware beats.

16 rotary controls

Plus, instead of the standard 8 regulators, there are all 16, which somewhat expands the room for manoeuvre when recording. For example, the top 8 can drive a virtual instrument, while the other 8 can be assigned to external effects and filters inside Ableton, Logic, Cubase, and any other DAW. And instead of pitch and modulation wheels, here we have a pair of touch strips with several modes of operation.

Comfortable and responsive keyboard

But the main thing is not even that, but the fact that in the second version of MiniLab, Arturia engineers completely redesigned the keyboard block. In the original version, the keys were tight and lacked dynamics. Here we also have a smaller version of the Arturia KeyLab senior line of keyboards with wide keys (a centimeter wider than other mini-keyboards), a pleasant stroke, high dynamics and sensitivity to velocity and pressing force. For the $100 option, the impressions are very positive.

Ableton Lite as a gift

Of the additional goodies, we note the ability to connect a sustain pedal and adjust the sensitivity of pressing (in fact, velocity curves are adjusted). Plus, along with a standard keyboard setup disk, the user receives a "fat-free" version of Ableton Lite, which can then be upgraded to a full-fledged Ableton at a discount. Also included is the UVI Grand Piano Model D virtual instrument, which is a sampled Steinway concert grand piano.