CyberGene

It’s a Nord Lead A1 clone and that has no aftertouch either.

This keyboard looks good on paper, however it seems all YouTube demos are of hip-hop music. What am I missing? Is that keyboard targeted at hip-hop only, or it's a coincidence that hip-hop musicians have somehow found it appealing for them, compared to other workstations?

Don’t take offense. One or two people in the world who still do won’t make a difference 😀

I’m not a gigging musician. I can speak from a user perspective though. Like it or not, streaming is the norm. Nobody listens to MP3-s and CD-s anymore. It’s so much easier with streaming. You pay a very small subscription fee and can listen to anything. Somebody makes a playlist and sends it to you. You click on the link and you already listen to it. When I get in my car, my iPhone wirelessly connects to CarPlay in the car, then I can just say “Siri play Animals by Pink Floyd”, etc. With that in mind, nobody owns MP3-s anymore since it’s just too awkward to use and obtaining them is often illegal. Giving them away certainly is. When everybody listens to Spotify, it’s almost impossible to rip those into MP3-s. You have to be at a computer and upload them and whatnot. Much easier to make a Spotify playlist even on your phone and in the bus. And send a link to it to other people. Who just click on it. World is moving on and while I understand the tendency of people to stick to what they are used to with age (I’m 44 and know that very well myself), it’s beneficial to try to learn new things. It will not only help you work out your brain, it will also bring you closer to younger folks. BTW, I’m on Apple Music and not Spotify. In Apple Music you can download offline files. They are ACC which is the same and can be opened in Transcribe as far as I remember. You have to play them on an authorized computer but that’s usually the case.

Congrats, the Trigon is one of the most desirable synths for me. I can afford it and I can’t find a fault with it but I’m at a point of my (amateur) music journey where I try to enforce myself not to buy expensive synths 😀 Let’s see how long I can stick to that plan…

It may be me but on a lot of modern pop/rock music I can’t really say if it’s in the major or the relative minor key. Especially when they (intentionally?) avoid the dominant to the minor key that would be the ultimate hint of this being minor. With that in mind, whether something is i-bVI or vi-IV is really vague to my mind unless hearing dominant sevenths and other apparent hints.

Technically you’re right. However in that Mystery Achievement (that I’ve never heard before) I hear that it changes keys. First it’s C# minor then it’s D major. While in C# minor the following chords repeat: C#m - A (and that’s exactly i-bVI that this thread is about!) Then it injects F#m followed by A which is treated as dominant to the key of D major and thus we modulate and go to repeats of: D - G (which is I - IV) then it goes through: D - Bm - F#m - G - A (I - vi - iii - IV - V) and suddenly goes back to the key of C# minor.

I've owned Hydrasynth, Novation Peak and most recently the Take 5. I’ve kept only the Hydrasynth because I realized I hate pots. You load a preset and then you have really no clue about the actual pot values. Seems like not a big issue but to me it is since I always want to dissect sounds and I’m a lot about programming. And even if you match values (which is a tedious process), on the Peak some of the envelope controls were shared between two of the envelopes, etc. I believe there was a similar situation with the Take 5 but can’t remember which one. If you’re mostly a preset player with only occasional touch-up, then I guess it won’t be an issue. Besides, polyphony of 5 is just too low for me. Having no FX is another deal breaker for me. I love modulating FX and having no FX on an expensive Prophet 5 is an odd decision to me. Also, I’m a heavy aftertouch user. Not necessarily poly but even with channel one, I prefer smooth control. The one in the Take 5 was not smooth. Not sure how that is in the Summit but I doubt it can be as good as the Hydra. However, as you correctly observed, it’s a bit harder to make the Hydra sound analog compared to the pure analog synths. But I’ve learnt all the tricks and it’s not a big deal to me anymore, the Hydra can sound very analog too.

CK61 is certainly among the most useful keyboards I’ve had. Not the best in any single area but the greatest all-rounder taking in mind also price, weight, size, speakers and battery-power ability.

Thanks, immediate purchase! Will test it later. You’ve done a nice demo 👍🏻

I am a very dedicated Arturia Analog Lab (and Collection V, by extension) user, I even use it for rehearsals with our amateur band, so I could be a perfect target audience for it. But sleeping over the idea a few days and I feel more and more lukewarm about it. I don’t think it will make it faster or easier for me to use the great presets, compared to my current setup of a single keyboard (Numa X 73 or KC61) and a MacBook Air M2. Just being able to browse the patches through the great Analog Lab UI on the computer actually makes it easier for me compared to what seems like a small circular display and a knob.

Has anyone of the YT reviewers checked how fast you can switch between the presets, especially when they are based on different synth models? My impression with the Analog Lab on my pretty fast Apple Silicon Mac is there’s still awkward lag. I wouldn’t want to scroll through thousands of presets if that’s slow. And hopefully there are no audible artifacts when doing so, because that’s often the case with FX chain. I guess it would be optimistic to expect so, but any chance of seamless transitions? Like e.g. keeping a chord held from current preset while changing to a new performance or whatever it’s called.

So, you can’t layer a piano and pad and use the sustain pedal. Seems people will keep using romplers for live playing then.

Not sure they have them in the US. Or if ever had them at all, although I think I read somewhere they imported Citroens in the past. I like their quirkiness and ride but I’d probably never buy one.

I’m wondering what the underlying hardware/architecture is. I bet it’s ARM based and their Apple Silicon revamp some years ago helped in porting it for any other ARM-based CPU easily. At 10kg which is almost twice the weight of a CK61 it’s a bit heavy for me though. Nice concept but I’d wait for it to get near or under €1000 (from the current €1600 list price) to count myself interested.

So, AstroLab is a great keyboard! But I really ROFL-ed when they started it with that crappy modeled piano that sounded like a cymbalom 🤣🤦🏻‍♂️

So, AstroLab is a great keyboard! But I really ROFL-ed when they started it with that crappy modeled piano that sounded like a cymbalom 🤣

Any moderator caring to rename the thread to “i-bVI”? 🙏🏻 Bonus points for putting b in front of the VI in my first post 😀 🍻

Apple acquiring Arturia? 😛

I think the award goes to the Airbag band. I’m serious, their entire output is based on endless repeats of i-bVI 😀 Here’s one of their most popular songs that’s made almost entirely of it:

I was wondering if I should write it as bVI or just VI since it’s a minor key, apparent by i. I meant bVI as MOI pointed out. And “dramatic/epic” was an exaggeration on my side 😀 BTW, I was sure that one of my favorite bands Porcupine Tree must not have abused it although they are an ideal place for it, however I stumbled upon one of their songs in the car today and it’s there too 😀 Not overly so, but still a few repetitions on a few places throughout the piece.

I’ve realized that even browsing all the thousands presets in the Lab V can give me anything I’d ever need. Despite owning the entire Collection V with all the tweakability that I never use. It’s only the pianos that are severely lacking but even then it would be a great instrument! Just having all these wonderful presets and a few pre-wired knobs with each preset in a self-contained keyboard would be a killer instrument.

Great question, following.

Yeah, I have the V-collection and followed that Piano-V revamp. It went from unusable to slightly less unusable. But I’m probably biased against modeled acoustic pianos 😀

Would be great indeed. CK61 layout with all the presets from Analog Lab. However Arturia’s modeled pianos and Rhodes are complete crap.