Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)A lot of reviewer here on Amazon, and also on Guitar Center and YouTube seem to think the action is heavy and loud. I have now owned and used 5 full size (88-key) pianos to use with sequencing on my PC and this is the best one yet. I got the MPK88 because of all the controls it offered. I use it with Reason 4.0 and it works perfectly!
I'll quickly compare it to my past pianos:
1) Technics (now Phillips) electric piano - felt great, sounded great, but not many built in sounds and no MIDI controls except for the keys themselves, and MIDI playback was always at 100% velocity (so it was super loud when playing MIDI into the Piano. I got rid of this to get my...
2) KORG Triton Extreme - AWESOME keyboard/workstation. My hope was to do all my sequencing and sampling on this keyboard without a PC, but after discovering Reason 4, I just used it as a MIDI controller. It was only a step up from the Technics piano in that it had the pitch bend and mod wheels. The "transport controls" (stop, play, record, etc) didn't map to MIDI out data, so I couldn't sync those buttons to Reason. The knobs would map out okay, but there were only 4! The Triton was a $2500 board new, and it felt as good as the Technics to me. Since I wasn't using all the bells and whistles of the KORG, I sold it and downgraded to an...
3) M-Audio Pro Keys 88 - Advertised as a "stage piano" that thing is solid, but not really all that great for the built in sounds. As a MIDI controller it offered about as much as the KORG except the knobs and sliders were not mapable. The keys themselves were hard to play in that it took a lot of pressure to get them moving, then they collapsed down the rest of the key stroke. The velocity readings were always high because of this (one had to play hard to get to play evenly). I could change it to a different velocity curve, but then everything would simply be scaled down and the notes I wanted to be high velocity wouldn't be. In other words, the keyboard lacked dynamic contrast. This problem moved me to my spare "gig board"...the
4) Casio CDP100 - It has built in speakers and standard MIDI out (like the Technics), but with shorter keystroke (and less pressure needed) than the KORG and M-Audio boards. This allowed me to have expressive playing (smooth playing) without having to play hard. The problem here is that the velocity readings were all so low! Even when I did play hard, they rarely went above 75%. Finally, i was fed up. I wanted a ton of MIDI controls with accurate playing and no concern for built in sounds. This led me to the
5) Akai MPK88 - Now that I've gone through all the other boards, I can say it feels somewhere between the KORG and the M-Audio. It's heavier than what I remember the KORG being and it does a bit of that key-collapsing feel of the M-Audio, but it reads the full range of velocity as I expect them to be read! I can play soft and loud passages, and they all show up as intended. That's the most important part to me. The board could be improved by taking out some of the initial force needed to press a key, but still, it deserves a much higher rating than it's been getting for a MIDI controller.
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