Mizu Posted August 16, 2009 Share Posted August 16, 2009 I thought this might interest some people on the board. I got mine this Friday. First impression: I heard people complain about the build quality of Novation boards, but this one feels sturdy to me. Sure, it's all plastic, and I wouldn't want to gig it without a case, but everything fits where it's supposed to. Nice. The missing second LCD is a pity, but you get used to it pretty fast. Keyboard feel is nice. I tested a SL 37 (Mk 1) and this feels very similar. I have a Motif ES 7 sitting next to it and the keys on the Novation have a bit more resistance, but are still very smooth and fluid to play. In A/B comparison I prefer them to the Yamaha. They seem quieter, too. I was looking forward to the X/Y pad but that was a bit disappointing - I haven't been able to use it for smooth cutoff/resonance changes, the sensitivity does not seem uniform across the board to me. I haven't owned a keyboard with drum pads before, I can see how people find them useful. They are woefully small, but have a nice grippy feel. I might just use them to switch between screensets, but I haven't had time to dig into that yet. I'm using this with Logic Studio 9, so I won't get the full benefit of Automap. Some templates for my 3rd party synths work (for instance my Korg Legacy collection), but they still need tweaking. I've set up templates in Advanced Mode for EVB3 (why only 8 faders...) and EVP88 - they work without a hitch. Getting ES2 to play is not easy, though - Logic allows for 6 MIDI controllers to be mapped directly, but if you want more you have to setup a transform object in the environment, and I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. OS: My unit is updated to 1.1.06 and it still has some quirks. In some cases the rotary encoders (with the LED lights) don't change values, and the faders are double-mapped to the rotary encoder parameter. In another case the sustain pedal wouldn't work. A factory reset fixed this for now. On the plus side, the reset did not overwrite my custom mappings for EVP88 and EVB3, phew... that's playing nice. What I'm sorely missing is an editor for the custom mappings that has the usability of Automap - for the Remote SL series something like that exists, but not yet for the SL2. This would be important as a template librarian as well. Bottom line: I'm mostly happy with the purchase. It does what I expected it to do. The OS quirks need to be resolved with updates. Note that the quirks were only in Automap mode, in Advanced Mode everything worked as advertised. So, if I were gigging with this I would only want to do this in Advanced Mode at the moment. "You'll never be as good as you could have been, but you can always be better than you are." - MoKen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sven Golly Posted August 16, 2009 Share Posted August 16, 2009 I heard people complain about the build quality of Novation boards I'd never heard that; I've always heard great things about the feel of the Novation actions, and little to nothing about build quality (and no news is good news on that front, from my experience). In A/B comparison I prefer them to the Yamaha. That's my experience as well, from the Novations that I've tried in the past. Bottom line: I'm mostly happy with the purchase. It does what I expected it to do. The OS quirks need to be resolved with updates. Note that the quirks were only in Automap mode, in Advanced Mode everything worked as advertised. So, if I were gigging with this I would only want to do this in Advanced Mode at the moment. Thanks for the review; I'm looking for something in the less-than-61-keys vein for laptop recording on the road, and have my eye on the MkII boards... nice to hear some real-world thoughts on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mizu Posted August 17, 2009 Author Share Posted August 17, 2009 I heard people complain about the build quality of Novation boards I'd never heard that; I've always heard great things about the feel of the Novation actions, and little to nothing about build quality (and no news is good news on that front, from my experience). I agree. The SL2 has some heft to it - it's heavier than I thought it would be, in a good way. And I'm really happy with the action - when I shopped around I looked at the Axiom, Axiom Pro and the Akai MPK49 and didn't like the action on any of them, but a quick tryout of the Novation and I was sold. "You'll never be as good as you could have been, but you can always be better than you are." - MoKen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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