USB Music Keyboard for PC

[thelawns]

Right then I'm not so sure this is the right section but it's as near as I can see to the subject...

I used to play on the keyboard when I was younger and we used to have a baby grand piano at my parents house 10 or so years ago and I have recently been having the urge to tinkle on the old ivories! I don't have room for a full size piano in my house sadly so I have been thinking about buying a compact Music Keyboard for the PC(Not a PC keyboard, a piano/electric style USB keyboard). To say it's a bit of a mine field is an understatement!

Now from a few websites I have perused it would appear, a 49 key keyboard would be ample and to be honest I don't want to spend a lot of money. I have stumbled across an M-Audio Keyrig 49 Keyboard with Software:

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/KeyRig49-main.html

I can find it online for around £60 but don't really know much about it. It looks good from what I can see though.

I have an Auzentech Prelude but I should imagine that won't be of any consequence, as the supplied software will create the sound or am I wrong?

I'm wondering if there is anyone else on here using any music keyboards and what your advice would be??

 

[Praxidike]

I have one that looks very similar to that (M-Audio Keystation 49), perhaps that's an updated model of mine.

I like mine, it works well... although it does feel a bit cheap sometimes, but that's probably because it was. I'd recommend it if you just want to play now and then, but if you're going to be using it every day I don't think it's up to it, although that all depends on the software you get - I haven't found anything particularly good really, the best I've found it called Mixcraft 4 and it's a bit basic.

 

[thelawns]

Cheers they do look very similar. I can see that one is available for about £7 cheaper from the same place I have seen the Keyrig... Did yours come with any software as it says it has Ableton Live Lite with it?

 

[Praxidike]

Cheers they do look very similar. I can see that one is available for about £7 cheaper from the same place I have seen the Keyrig... Did yours come with any software as it says it has Ableton Live Lite with it?

Yeah, it came with Ableton, but I wasn't impressed with it, and only tried to use it for a couple of minutes before giving up and trying other programs.

It may work perfectly though, I just didn't have the patience to see if it worked properly and didn't give it a chance!

 

[thelawns]

I'm not overly bothered by the actual recording my own music part, I really just want to have a mess around and play on it. I assume I can do this with the Ableton software?

 

[Praxidike]

I'm not overly bothered by the actual recording my own music part, I really just want to have a mess around and play on it. I assume I can do this with the Ableton software?

Probably - I already had Mixcraft installed that I knew recognised my keyboard, and I couldn't find the option to enable the keyboard in Ableton in the first minute of use, so I gave up out of laziness and went back to Mixcraft.

But yeah, it would be silly of them to hand out software with hardware that isn't compatible, so I would assume it works with the keyboard.

 

[thelawns]

LOL, I know it's compatible with the software but can I use it to just 'play' music on like an electric keyboard, chopsticks etc??

 

[thelawns]

I just won an M-Audio Keystation 49e on fleabay for £40 all in. Apparantly the volume slider is a bit sticky but i hope I can sort that out and it was missing the USB A-B cable. Have some of those lying around so no issue really. It's boxed and includes the software so not bad me thinks. Will see what turns up though!

 

[Praxidike]

LOL, I know it's compatible with the software but can I use it to just 'play' music on like an electric keyboard, chopsticks etc??

Yep, you'll be able to do that.

 

[thelawns]

Cor blimey. The supplied software is so buggy it's ridiculous!!! However, despite knowing very little about this sort of thing, Ableton Live Lite 4 with the free upgrade to version 7 is an astonishing piece of software.

Took me a while to make any sound through it before I realised I needed to drag sounds onto the midi part for it to work.

I really want some Piano 'Live Packs' but you seem to have to pay for most things.

 

[cerouax]

You can always download the FL Studio demo (in which you can play live, but the save function is disabled). There are a couple of soft synths as part of the app, including a piano emulator. You will need a soundcard with good drivers to avoid latency when playing the keyboard.
Link to demo: http://www.flstudio.com/documents/download.html

 

[thelawns]

That's great, will give that a try thanks...

I have an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, is this any good for this sort of thing??

 

[cerouax]

That card should be fine. You may require some tweaking in FL Studio for latency settings, but everything is simple enough with the assistance of help files in the app.