Arturia KeyLab MkIII

‘One keyboard to rule them all’ is very much the order of the day with Arturia’s 3rd generation KeyLab.

In August 2023, I reviewed the Arturia KeyLab Essential 61 MkIII. It was a decent, lightweight but fully featured MIDI controller with some new and well‑implemented plug‑in and DAW integration. Over a year later Arturia are bringing their premium KeyLab up to speed with a fresh MkIII overhaul. It makes me wonder whether the new KeyLab 61 I have here is just playing catch‑up or if it has more to offer than its cut‑price sibling.

Before I even got it out of the box I could tell from its sheer weight that this is a premium machine. You could fling the KE61 MkIII around with one hand, whereas this new KeyLab is a definite two‑hander. The underbelly is made of metal, with well‑placed feet, and so sits resolutely on your desk: unmoving, unbending and really rather handsome. Compared to the MkII, the refinement of the design is so classy that it looks like it comes from a different league. It feels more like a stage piano or synthesizer than a humble MIDI controller. So often, MIDI controllers are rather chunky bits of plastic; this is the opposite.

The one I have in for review is the 61‑keyed black version and it’s gorgeous. The off‑centred colour screen is set in a square of shiny fingerprint‑attracting plastic, surrounded by eight buttons with a lovely silver hi‑fi‑style encoder just to the right. Arturia have shaved off a bit of the depth, which helps it feel neater and slimmer, but at the cost of four pads and a row of what were probably useful buttons. On the left side, you have function buttons, transport controls and the remaining 12 pads. On the 61‑key version, the pitch and mod wheels are pushed up above the keyboard, which helps keep the width under control. The right side houses a row of nine encoders and nine faders. These are featureless and sink back into a black background making them almost invisible in low light as if designed by Hotblack Desiato himself. Thankfully, they are touch‑sensitive and so the display will tell you which one your finger is on. I feared I might have to resort to adding some Tipex to the encoders and fader caps just so I can see them more clearly.

Round the back, we have proper in and out DIN MIDI ports, three pedal/footswitch ports and a USB‑C connection that also provides power. There’s also a DC power input if you want to power it differently, but there’s no adaptor supplied in the box. I’m disappointed not to see any CV/gate outputs.

Round the back we find three quarter‑inch sockets for aux in and expression and sustain pedals, full‑size MIDI I/O ports, an external power supply input and a USB‑C port.

Turning to the keyboard itself, this is a new design, custom‑made by Arturia, with a semi‑weighted, synth‑action feel. It’s soft, bouncy and convincing under your fingers. It makes very little noise and feels much nicer than anything else within reach at the moment. Sadly, Arturia haven’t pulled in the polyphonic aftertouch from the PolyBrute 12, which feels like a missed opportunity for their premium controller. But we do have channel aftertouch, which is well implemented, and you don’t tend to set it off by accident. It also has release velocity, but while I understand the concept, I can’t find any way to use it, nor any mention of it in the manual.

Sadly, Arturia haven’t pulled in the polyphonic aftertouch from the PolyBrute 12, which feels like a missed opportunity for their premium controller.

Three Mighty Modes

The KeyLab MkIII has three layers of control. You have Arturia mode, which is custom‑designed for Analog Lab and the other Arturia software instruments. You have DAW mode for controlling the mixer and native devices within a supported DAW. And then you have User mode, where you can create custom MIDI configurations to control whatever you like.

If you just want MIDI control over third‑party plug‑ins that can MIDI Learn, then a User mode patch will do all that by default. In fact, the Arturia mode will do so too, but the display won’t show anything to do with the instrument you’re playing. For more nuanced control, the MIDI Control Centre software provides the tools you need to customise every control on the KeyLab. You can set up and name controls for hardware synths and other bits of gear that are easily recallable. You can also edit it all on the KeyLab itself, without a computer, if you don’t mind digging around in menus.

Arturia Standalone

Arturia Mode is where all the magic lies, and in particular that means Analog Lab. The KeyLab comes with Analog Lab Pro and offers a simplified interface over hundreds and hundreds of presets taken from Arturia’s whole range of virtual instruments. The interface is grey and uninviting and likes nothing more than being a list of patches. However, the KeyLab brings some joy to the experience by throwing a small picture of the synth in question onto the display along with the preset name and any parameters you are currently touching.

All the sounds are pre‑mapped to the encoder/fader array and ready for your tweaking. The first four knobs are always mapped to the Brightness, Timbre, Time and Movement macros and the remaining knobs and sliders are mapped to other appropriate controls. They can vary for every preset and every instrument. Using the buttons around the display and master encoder, you can browse and drill down through the entire library without ever lifting your head to look at the computer. You can combine two sounds into one patch, either layered or split across the keyboard, and then switch between them for tweaking.

The experience really is as close to hardware as it gets. We’ve seen Arturia take this idea further with the AstroLab stage keyboard, where you can store the virtual instrument in the actual keyboard. The KeyLab MkIII can give a very similar feel, provided you don’t mind taking the computer along.

Analog Lab does have its limitations. You can’t, for instance, remap any of the controls: you are stuck with whatever Arturia have set up for you. I’ve found that if I don’t have the actual instrument installed, then Analog Lab will complain when I try to open the GUI for it within Analog Lab. It’s like it’s expecting me to already own the V Collection, which is a little presumptuous. The preset editor window doesn’t offer any hardware control other than the EQ and master level, which leaves a row of stompbox effects out of the loop. Arturia have evidently put a lot of work into curating these Analog Lab presets and programming the control connection to the KeyLab. They’ve achieved a pretty seamless level of interaction which is very satisfying but feels a little unfinished in some places.

If you own any other Arturia instruments, you can use Arturia mode directly on them too, although this is where I encountered a bit of a difference of opinion over who should be in charge of what I want to control. As with the curated control in Analog Lab, the first four encoders of every Arturia synth I’ve tried are mapped to the four macros. Now, this may just be me, but I don’t want this. When I load up a synthesizer like the Mini V or the Jun‑6 V, I want to control the filter, but I can’t because those first two knobs are mapped to Brightness and Timbre. Those two macros might well be controlling the filter, but they tend to be scaled and are often actually mapped to something else or a combination of things. In the right context, the macro might be perfect, but more often than not I just want the filter cutoff and resonance on those two first knobs, with the full range of movement and nothing else — please.

I could remap them, which sounds sensible, but I ran into a problem where the filter behaved strangely if I mapped it to the first two encoders. Any other controls map without any issues. So there’s something odd at play. It’s probably just a bug that Arturia haven’t noticed, because why would anyone not want to use the beautifully curated mappings that they’ve given us?

The KeyLab MkIII is also available in white...

DAW Control

Scripted DAW Control was introduced with the KE MkIII and did a good job of offering more in‑depth and specific control over the familiar Mackie/HUI control you get with most MIDI controllers. The KeyLab MkIII supports the same list of DAWs, including Logic Pro, Cubase, Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio and FL Studio. For this review, I knocked around in those last three.

In every instance a Mixer option throws level and panning control on the faders and encoders. All the transport controls work properly, and it feels like a solid, regular, basic DAW controller. It’s when you activate ‘Plug‑in’ mode (also known as Device mode in some DAWs) that things start to get interesting.

All the Devices in Live and Bitwig, whether instruments or effects, and all the included plug‑ins in FL Studio, were automatically mapped and ready to go. It’s all there, with no fuss, labelled correctly on the screen. It’s a remarkably slick and seamless instrument‑controlling experience. One of my criticisms of the KeyLab Essential was that you couldn’t skip to the next Device in a chain, but now you can by simply holding a button and turning the encoder. This is how to do DAW control.

In Bitwig and Ableton Live the 4x3 pads become clip launchers, in full colour, and have a genuine ability to useful in their limited view and range. In FL Studio they come into play as steps and pattern selectors for the step sequencer, which is a nice touch. Otherwise they are decent as drum pads with a good feel and velocity sensitivity.

However, it’s not all plain sailing. One thing you realise pretty quickly is that you can’t map anything while in DAW mode, and this is the same for all the DAWs I’ve tried. The Plug‑in or Device mode that gives excellent control over in‑built plug‑ins doesn’t offer any sort of MIDI control over anything else. It’s really counter‑intuitive when you’re controlling an FL Studio plug‑in or a Bitwig Device to have to switch out to a completely different mode to control an Arturia or third‑party instrument.

And then the control over Arturia instruments was surprisingly inconsistent. I found that you could load up one Arturia synth and it would work fine; you could move from track to track, switch to Arturia mode and the GUI would come up with everything perfectly mapped for control. If you loaded up the same instrument on another track, say multiple Analog Labs, they would all work flawlessly. However, if you loaded up a different Arturia instrument the KeyLab would get hung up on the first one and not reflect the move to another synth on the display. It’s like the display had crashed. I tried this out on multiple DAWs, different computers and even phoned a couple of friends, and they all reported similar outcomes.

You can absolutely see what Arturia are aiming for, and when it works, it’s superb, but it’s just not coming off reliably enough, which makes it difficult to fully trust and you end up using a User mode to map controls the old‑fashioned way. Hopefully, these things will get ironed out in time because they undermine what is otherwise a sublime controlling experience.

Arp

Arpeggiators are very useful but often very standard affairs, and so my expectations here were fairly low. I’m thrilled to report that the KeyLab MkIII has a bunch of really cool features that could make it unexpectedly fun and interesting.

It starts off looking normal enough, with a handful of uninspiring modes such as time division, octave range, swing and bpm. But if you press the Random button, you then get to play with the probabilistic nature behind the curtain. You can dial down the likelihood of each note triggering, you can increase the possibility of notes being skipped, you can mess about with the division, flow out and into octaves, push the gate length about, screw in some ratchets and float the velocity about the place. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole wave of interesting things happening and if you’re not sure what to do next, just hit the dice for instant semi‑controlled mayhem.

Chords & Scales

Chord and Scale modes are very common in controllers, but the KeyLab makes good use of the display to give you a visual representation of what’s going on. You can select the root note and type of scale, and the result is shown on the display across two octaves of keys. There’s a good selection of scales, and you can create your own by turning keys on and off. When you play, any notes outside the scale are pulled into line, so you never play a wrong note.

Chord mode is similarly solid with lots of types, added bass notes, revoicing and a really nice strumming feature. With the strumming, you can chose a direction and speed, like with an arpeggiator, but you can also add ‘Spread’, which will do interesting things like increase the range of notes based on velocity or aftertouch. You can create your own chords, and that can be as simple as holding the Chord button and playing what you’re after.

The only thing missing would be a quicker way to move between chord types, like maybe having a handful of types mapped to the mod wheel or a spare encoder so you could move between them in performance.

The Keylab MkIII feels like a beautifully made MIDI controller with a premium keyboard and some really useful features.

Conclusion

Putting aside the Arturia mode for a moment, the KeyLab MkIII feels like a beautifully made MIDI controller with a premium keyboard and some really useful features. The Chord and Scale modes are nicely done, the arp is really great and fun to use, and the display, knobs and sliders are all top‑notch. Working within the three DAWs I tried, the mixer and transport control is solid and the Device/Plug‑in mapping to the DAWs’ own plug‑ins is brilliant. It’s an almost seamless experience. What would make this side of the equation perfect for me would be to have a third button within the DAW mode that lets you MIDI map to any other synth. It seems really weird to me that you can’t do that without dropping out of DAW mode and into a User mode.

Arturia’s vision for a seamless virtual instrument‑driven experience is almost there, but unfortunately it currently misses the mark. When it works then the KeyLab‑to‑Analog Lab connection is fantastic and feels like a hardware synthesizer. It’s good too on other Arturia instruments, provided you stay within accepted parameters and do as you’re told. If Arturia can sort out the issues of remapping the filter and switching between their own synths within a DAW, then they’ll have a wonderfully integrated system. I think because other companies like Native Instruments, Novation and Akai Pro have similar systems of integrated control in place, our expectations of how well that works are much higher than they used to be. Arturia have shown that they have the potential to be all over this; they just have to squash the bugs.

Information

KeyLab MkIII 49 £379, KeyLab MkIII 61 £466. Prices include VAT.

www.sourcedistribution.co.uk

www.arturia.com

KeyLab MkIII 49 $499, KeyLab MkIII 61 $549.

www.arturia.com

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