Arturia KeyLab Mk3 61 White - Master Keyboard

Since my DAW doesn't integrate super well yet (ever?... Studio One), I haven't tested the Arturia VST integrations a whole lot. What little I did was pretty glitchy in my DAW.But it's still four stars because I didn't even buy it for that purpose. What I needed was the maximum # of full sized, reasonably playable keys that could fit in the space I have available for a controller. I also needed it to be slim, because I find it really distracting to be reaching up 4 inches to the keys. A lot of small, full-size keys controllers are just too fat that way.If that's something important to you, you'll be glad to know that the surface of the keys on this unit is about 1 3/4" from the desktop.So the whole thing looks and feels sleek. A lot of us creatives are very distracted by 'ugly,' and a bit inspired by beautiful hardware. There is zero ugly here.The play experience is pretty good. I've been using real pianos and fully weighted digital pianos for a pretty long time now, so synth/semi-weighted action doesn't feel "right" to me, but it is good enough for my purposes.A word about the interface. If you're like me, you'll be initially confused by the 'Back' button. It only goes back in certain contexts and for a lot of others you have to hit Program. So navigation is a bit quirky until you get used to it. I have sent my feedback to Arturia and they were warmly responsive. The gist: people expect a 'back' button to take them to wherever they just were in all contexts. Hopefully we see that smoothed out a bit in a future firmware update.But it's really not a problem for me since I usually just turn it on, hit the main encoder to go into DAW mode and start playing (after running the appropriate software of course).