Korg Keystage 61

With polyphonic aftertouch, MPE and MIDI 2.0, Korg’s Keystage has a lot to offer.

The genus ‘MIDI controller’ spans a wide range of species, ranging from large, heavily endowed 88‑note keyboards offering sophisticated control surfaces to tiny devices that you can slip into a pocket. Between these extremes, there are all manner of products including numerous 49‑ and 61‑note keyboards looking for their niche, and it’s into this crowded market that Korg have launched the Keystage 49 and Keystage 61, the latter of which is the subject of this review.

Let’s Be Hard

Designed as both a MIDI controller and a USB audio interface, it has a smart finish, and its wooden end cheeks do much to give it an air of quality. But it’s not chunky, nor does it feel particularly robust, largely because it’s based upon a plastic chassis. Nonetheless, the modern trend is for light and slim so, in this regard, it scores well.

Unlike many MIDI controllers, it’s devoid of programmable buttons, pads and faders. This means that its sparse top panel is dominated by just nine rotary knobs. By default, the Value encoder sends Program Change messages and the eight pots send MIDI CCs, but many additional functions are available in various modes, and you can see the parameters assigned to the knobs as well as their values on their associated screens. While these are bright and crisp, they’re also tiny, so you may find yourself reaching for your reading glasses to use them.

The Polytouch keybed is unweighted and springy. Back in the 1970s, we called this ‘synth action’, and we were grateful when semi‑weighted and piano‑action keyboards started to appear on synthesizers. It offers four degrees of expression: velocity, aftertouch, polyphonic aftertouch and MPE, but I worry when I read in the manual that: “The aftertouch sensors on the keyboard may wear out if you press into the keyboard too hard. For this reason, avoid pressing into the keyboard harder than necessary.” It feels as if Korg are getting their defence in early. On a more positive note, the pitch‑bend and modulation wheels and the octave/transpose buttons are in their correct positions to the left of the keyboard. What’s more, you can connect any combination of sustain and expression pedals to the (nominally) damper and expression inputs, which adds flexibility.

Unfortunately, Korg have followed the Douglas Adams school of design, endowing the Keystage with black legends on a black background, and with little black lights that light up black on black buttons to let you know when you’ve done something! OK, it’s not quite as bad as that, but it’s not far off. For example, the rear‑panel legends are embossed (so they are, literally, black on a black background), and the top‑panel legends are printed in a grey that’s almost impossible to read in adverse conditions. Furthermore, while some of the buttons have backlights, these only indicate when a function is on, so you have two rows of closely spaced buttons offering little to help you to see what’s happening.

At the rear of the Keystage, you’ll find three slots that allow you to attach an expansion plate. There are two possible positions (one in the centre and the other to the right), and two angles (flat or inclined slightly upward). The plate is a little over four inches deep but, if you mount it to the right, the total flat area (including the otherwise unused area of the top panel) is around eight inches deep. I placed a 15‑inch MacBook Pro in this position and, to my surprise, everything remained in place. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t want to use anything heavier than a small tablet without a liberal application of Velcro.

Let’s Be Soft

The philosophy of MIDI Controllers has changed over the past few decades. Once upon a time, they offered up to eight zones, allowing players to control multiple audio sources simultaneously from a single keyboard. Not so here; although you can allocate different MIDI channels to various controls, the keyboard is a single zone.

Nonetheless, the Keystage has three extra facilities that help to keep things interesting. The first is an arpeggiator that’s driven by an internal clock if no external clock is applied. While not as esoteric as some, it nevertheless offers 20 patterns and 16 parameters that affect its output, including a random probability that any given step will (or won’t) play a note. If you set this up carefully, you can even create drum patterns with a degree of variation between arpeggio cycles. (Well... you can, but I’ve no idea why you would.) Happily, you can assign your choice of eight arpeggio parameters to knobs 1 to 8, which makes it easier to ‘play’ the arpeggiator in real time because you don’t have to step through pages to find the one you want.

The second is a chord mode. You can create a chord of up to eight notes under each key in the octave, giving you a maximum of 12 chords at any given moment. (If you play the same key in a different octave, you obtain the same chord but transposed accordingly.) A strum function does as you would expect, and you can determine its time and direction. In addition, a velocity mode allows you to switch between up and down strums. A chord setup is called a Chord Set, and there are 32 factory sets as well as 32 memories into which you can save your own.

The third is MIDI 2.0, which expands the ways in which MIDI devices talk to each other. This is bidirectional so, as well as being controlled by the Keystage, a soft synth or DAW can say to it, “these are my most important parameters, and I suggest that you assign them to your knobs”. The Keystage comes bundled with three items of software that support MIDI 2.0: Ableton Live 11 Lite, Wavestate Native LE, and the Korg Gadget Producer Bundle. So, for example, if you connect it to something running Gadget, eight parameters are automatically mapped from the selected synth or drum machine to the Keystage’s knobs. Should you then switch between gadgets, it reconfigures itself to support the new one. I was quite sceptical about the value of this until I tried it, whereupon I was an immediate convert. To be fair, there won’t be much value in MIDI 2.0 until more products support it, but it’s backwards‑compatible, so devices offering it should still work correctly when used with older MIDI equipment.

In Use

Before playing the Keystage, I checked the system version and found that it was obsolete. So I visited the URL shown in the manual, which turned out to be the Korg PA1000 update page. This contains a message not to try to install the upgrade on anything other than a PA1000, so I hunted for the correct page, found it, and downloaded and installed the Keystage update. The URL for the Korg Kontrol software (see box) was also wrong, so let’s hope that someone at Korg has fixed these by the time that you read this!

Suppose that you’re playing a Hammond soft synth and you want to ride the drawbars while doing so. Can you do this on something with a bank of assignable faders? Yes, you can. Can you do it on a Keystage? No, you can’t...

Next, I launched a soft synth that responds to polyphonic aftertouch and MPE and created a dual‑layer Program comprising an e‑piano patch with velocity directed to the amplitude and filter cutoff frequency, and a Vangelis‑esque brass patch with poly‑aftertouch directed to the same. At this point, I was delighted to find that the aftertouch threshold is an adjustable parameter. This determines the amount of pressure that’s needed to activate aftertouch, which is a vital factor for anyone who likes to use this mode of expression. I was almost ready to play but, before doing so, I wanted to save my settings, including my choice of velocity and aftertouch curves, pedal assignments and so on. One does so by saving a Scene that contains the user page, arpeggiator, chord and some of the keyboard settings. But when did the universally understood concept of ‘saving’ something turn into ‘registering’ it? The manual frequently refers to registering things, which is more than a little confusing. Anyway... there are 16 Scene memories, and you’re provided with factory presets in locations 1 to 6 that match Korg’s Wavestate Native, Opsix Native, Modwave Native, Microkorg, Triton and Polysix soft synths. Happily, you can edit and, umm... register to all 16, so you’re not saddled with a bunch of useless setups if you don’t need them.

It was now time to play. Although the keyboard is too light and springy for my taste, I was able to play the e‑piano expressively, and the brass patch responded smoothly to aftertouch. However, I must admit that I found the keybed to be a little noisy and the knobs to be a bit wobbly. But that wasn’t what worried me most. For the duration of the review, the Keystage was mounted on an X‑stand with the supports about five inches from each end of the unit. When I played a big, fat chord with both hands near the centre of the keyboard and then leaned into notes to use poly‑aftertouch, I found that the whole unit flexed downward a little. It was now obvious why Korg have placed rubber feet in the centre as well as at both ends of the Keystage; it’s really designed for use on a desktop, and I suspect that its life on an X‑stand will not be as long nor as happy. I was also concerned with the pitch‑bend and modulation wheels, which scraped very slightly against the top panel, and I found the return spring on the pitch‑bend wheel to be too strong for my taste. Oh yes... and neither wheel is labelled, which is unhelpful.

Nevertheless, the Keystage has things going for it, and we shouldn’t underestimate the value of polyphonic aftertouch, MPE and MIDI 2.0, but it’s not hard to look elsewhere and find MIDI controllers festooned with faders, buttons, pads and larger screens. Do these matter? Well, yes, they can. Suppose that you’re playing a Hammond soft synth and you want to ride the drawbars while doing so. Can you do this on something with a bank of assignable faders? Yes, you can. Can you do it on a Keystage? No, you can’t, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Similarly, you may find it more comfortable tapping in drum patterns using velocity‑sensitive pads rather than keys. Of course, your needs may not include playing Hammonds or programming rhythms, so you’ll have to decide whether Korg’s choice of facilities is appropriate for you.

Now, what of that USB audio interface? The manual and Korg’s website quote this as “Audio format: 44.1kHz, 16‑bit”, but I don’t understand what this means. Perhaps I’m being a trifle thick here, but it’s not an input converting analogue audio into a specified digital audio format, and I couldn’t imagine that it would only work when receiving 44.1kHz, 16‑bit digital audio. So I copied a track from a CD and created copies at sample rates ranging from 96kHz to 8kHz and word lengths ranging from 24‑bit to 8‑bit. As I had hoped, it worked with all of them. While I doubt that the Keystage resides in the higher echelons of digital/analogue conversion, I found it entirely serviceable when monitoring my DAW as I recorded new parts.

Finally, I should note that the Keystage offers a degree of integration with many DAWs. My weapon of choice is Digital Performer, and it proved simple to connect the Keystage to this and then use the Control Surface Settings menu to map 10 functions from the DAW to the controller: play, stop, record, loop, metronome on/off, next track, previous track, rewind, fast‑forward, and undo. Integration with Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, Cakewalk, Ableton Live, Korg Gadget, GarageBand, Studio One and FL Studio is also provided, so there’s a good chance that your needs are covered.

If you want a stylish MIDI controller for the studio and don’t require it to be festooned with faders, buttons and pads, the Keystage 61 could fit the bill.

Conclusions

If you want a stylish MIDI controller for the studio and don’t require it to be festooned with faders, buttons and pads, the Keystage 61 could fit the bill. There’s much to like about it, but the review unit also revealed a number of shortcomings, some of which could (and should) have been corrected before release. Many of Korg’s keyboards are fab, but I feel that this one is destined to be Marmite. You’re either going to love it or... you’re not.

Information

£499 including VAT.

www.korg.co.uk

$699

www.korg.com

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