Keith McMillen Instruments‘ Kickstarter project for their new K-Board Pro 4 is now fully funded, with 10 days left to go.
The K-Board Pro 4 is a Class-Compliant USB-powered MIDI controller that captures velocity, continuous pressure, and both horizontal and vertical position. This gives you continuous expressive control over individual notes, not offered by traditional keyboards.
They also recently shared a couple of videos demoing the new K-Board Pro 4. The first, above, features Matt Lebofsky of Secret Chiefs 3 and MoeTar shredding with the Equator synth from Roli.
The second, below, features Colin Hogan at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum, testing the Pro 4 out with a Sequential Circuits Prophet T8 and a Rhodes Chroma.
Pricing and Availability
The initial run of the K-Board Pro 4 is being funded via a Kickstarter project, and the controller is available to backers for US $450. Note that they officially have a delivery date of Sept 2017, though they say it’s very likely that they will be able to ship units well in advance of that date.
I wish Ableton asked for funding on Kickstarter so they can finally implement support for these types of controllers. It’s 2017 next month and there’s already plenty of these on the market and yet they are next to useless in Live!
Is bitwig better on this?
yes, Bitwig allows the recording and editing of all the dimensions of touch that these controllers provide.
Yeah, Bitwig actually has built in MPE support now, so it’ll work great. As does Logic.
The problem with Live is they hate MIDI channels and there’s no way to preserve multiple channels inside tracks. So you end up having to create 16 tracks per instrument, and do lots of fiddling, which is really a non-starter. It kills workflow as the workaround is too tedious.
Ableton engineers and management know about the issue, and there’s been complaints about it for many years, even before MPE existed and it was called MIDI Guitar Mode. But Ableton is dogmatically committed to not having proper MIDI channel or sysex support. Not supporting these features is basically a fanatical religious issue for management. They are right and everyone else in the world is wrong, so go away. That’s the sum of it. There have even been advocates within Ableton and they were eventually driven from the company.
What Logic lacks is MPE in the Controller Assignments. You can assign parameters inside Logic’s instruments, while assigning a parameter to an effect insert isn’t possible yet.
yes. bitwig support MPE
try logic
What about Studio One or FL Studio ?
Studio One records ptichbend, velocity, aftertouch and “filter resonance” for CC74. I don’t see midi release velocity anywhere though.
This one got just got funded in time. After the steep support in first few days, the funding died off very fast, much different than what happened with the bop-pad. Hope KMI will decide to offer black keys instead of blue in the remaining week. Also holding my breath that we will see lots of other MPE input devices coming on the market before September 2017 from major brands, perhaps on NAMM. It’s still very early MPE days.
Must have wireless midi built in like the Alesis Vortex Wireless