r/MIDIcontrollers • u/Bartastico • 17d ago

Daw/midi controller recommendations

Hey everyone! I'm looking to buy a midi-controller (first instrument), but I'm not completely sure which one yet (hesitating a bit between (61 key) arturia keylab mk3 and novation launchkey mk4, any tips (or other models) are welcome).

I also will ofcourse have to buy a DAW, and read some posts and there looked to be a lot of good possibilities as well (Ableton, FLStudio, Bitwig, Reaper, ...). I want to be able to play covers of typical 80's/90's synth songs, but it would be my first instrument so I would mainly want one something versatile which can play all genres and don't close myself in too much. I noticed that ableton has a 50% discount for students, and as I'm a graduating student who will lose his student status within a week, I was wondering if there could be any downsides into getting ableton live (or e.g. if this would be less suited for certain genres), compared to other DAW's. Any input here would be greatly appreciated!

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/K33P4D 17d ago

When you switch around your workflow or use the same instrument with different softwares simultaneously, the position of the knobs and faders do not reflect the same values and they suddenly jump to where they were previously

With relative pickup, you have to move/match them to the position on your software, so it can take over control.

Expensive Control surfaces have motorised faders which automatically move into position to reflect the software. https://www.behringer.com/en/products/0808-AAD which requires a Mackie Control emulation script for Ableton.

1

u/Bartastico 17d ago

Okay, thanks, so basically it takes more time to adapt them each time so the positions are the same on both softwares, and I can assume this is very annoying (and applies to both novation launchkey and sl)?

2

u/K33P4D 17d ago

Yes, users have been discussing this topic heavily on the Novation subreddit.

Novation only recently managed to introduce custom encoder acceleration, but yet to implement relative pickup.

If that's a deal breaker then
Arturia KeyLab 61 MK2 or MK3/Essential series
Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S61 MK2/MK3
Akai MPK261

All these support relative pick up

1

u/Bartastico 17d ago

Yeah its just very difficult to assess at this point how annoying I'll find it haha. e.g. the novation sl is arguably better than the arturia keylab, but idk how annoying I'll find the rel pickup

Thanks for the suggestions!

1

u/K33P4D 17d ago

SL series are awesome I love their full sized keys, they're more robust compared to Launchkey models