What is the best MIDI controller board?

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Xavier

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I am buying a Yamaha Motif ES rack in a few weeks plus additional racks in the future and I'm looking for a nice quality controller keyboard to play into it. I'm looking for a nice 88 key weighted or semi-weighted board to use, but i am really looking for good performance features like a wide selection of on-board effects and good overall performance like high speed or low-latency.

Are there any controller keyboards out there that are good for live performances??

I've basically been looking at a couple M-audio boards and Studiologic controllers so far but some reviews are good and others say the product is slow or poor in performance like the M-audio Keystation Pro-88. I'll be playing into my new PreSonus Firepod which i haven't had a chance to experiment with yet so please toss me some opinions on what you think are the best controller keyboards out there, money really isn's an object, but i'm trying to keep it under $1,000. Thanks.
 
Studiologic (formely Fatar)


or

M-Audio take your pick :)

both make boards with 88 weighted keys for well under $1000.00

Anyone having problems with the board didn't hook it up right.

Run down to a GC and see which one "feels" right to you.

Best of luck
 
Xavier said:
I'm looking for a nice 88 key weighted or semi-weighted board to use, but i am really looking for good performance features like a wide selection of on-board effects and good overall performance like high speed or low-latency.
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There's no such thing as a midi controller board with 'wide selection of on-board effects' --- the 'on-board effects' come from the modules on the other end of the midi cable.

Also, the controller has nothing to do with 'high speed or low-latency'. Midi is a 31.2kB serial language and that's not negotiable and doesn't vary from product to product. 'Low-latency' is a computer term meaning to minimize the delay from key press to the note sounding - a midi controller has nothing to do with this either because that's up to the computer you are using for recording and how you have it set up.

Read up on midi basics here and here.
 
Oh i understand now, thanks for clearing that up so simply, but what about running a rack through a synthesizer and being able to twist and tweak the rack voices using the synth as the controller??
 
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That would get you into the big world of an area of the midi spec called 'continuous controllers'.

These vary so widely from one synth manufacturer to another that it comes down to a thourough reading of the midi implementation chart for the synth in question.

In general, all modern synths respond to CC 7 for master volume, CC 10 for pan and a combination of CC 38 and CC 6 for bank change command. There are other standards (like CC 74 for Filter Frequency and CC 71 for Filter Resonance) but they get foggy after that, and each synth has several paramaters that are unique to that synth and therefore couldn't be part of a standard CC set. Those are unually the interesting ones, and the ones that would have the biggest effect on the patch if twisted and tweaked.

I couldn't find a good article in my cursory Googling, but here's a link to a Keybored article that restates much of what I've said - link.
 
Apart from good keys, after touch, etc, It would be nice to get something with plenty of knobs for twiddling. Each knob, pan-pot or fader on your controller keyboard, can be assigned to control any parameter that you may have on your other Midi gear or software, for example Filter cutoff on a synth you may have. You can assign them to any midi parameter you want, so make sure its got some knobs for plenty of twiddling action!
 
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