In this video, Arturia Product Manager Pierre offers a deep dive into AstroLab, their new stage keyboard.
The Arturia AstroLab is a new stage keyboard that brings the company’s massive line of virtual instruments to standalone hardware.
AstroLab features 10 sound engines, 34 instruments and over 1300 presets, letting you cover a huge range of sounds using a single instrument.
Check out the video and share your thoughts in the comments!
OK, so its a potent stage KEYBOARD that’s mostly a platform for Arturia’s libraries. There have been so many different synths over the years that I just see this as another along the way. Every company understandably monetizes their libraries. Its a mass of work!
Some people will like this just fine as a whopper of a preset machine. There has been some grumbling over that, but Arturia has a large customer base. I’ll bet a lot of them went SQUEEE! with joy when presented with a decent controller that will hold the results of their V Collection work.
At some point, we have multi-timbral workstation keyboards like K2600, Kronos/Nautilus, etc, with multiple synth techniques/engines, with some compromises.
Next, we access full multi-timbral virtual instruments on a computer, using a controller. This offers maximum flexibility, but is weirdly more tedious to configure.
Next, we start to see controllers that have some affinity to the manufacturers’ software– instruments like Korg KeyStage or NI Kontrol (which weirdly doesn’t work well as a generic controller!), and Arturia’s KeyLab.
And now we see a product that tempts you to leave your computer & interface at home. Along with it, you lose the large screen of your laptop, the multi-timbral capabilities, the ability to mix & match VI’s, the keyboard/mouse/trackpad; leaving you with a more portable device with what, two VI instances?
I don’t want to seem unfair. For people well invested in the Arturia ecosystem, who don’t need more than two (?) multi-timbral channels, this is probably a win-win.