Arturia MiniLab 3 hands-on: A giant improve for a price range MIDI controller | Engadget

Look, there’s no scarcity of inexpensive MIDI controllers on the market. And for those who follow the large manufacturers, it’s kinda exhausting to go fallacious. Arturia itself even has a number of price range choices which are all fairly stable in their very own proper. One of its hottest, the MiniLab is getting a reasonably main replace that features modifications to the controls, an arpeggiator, and the addition of a MIDI port – and full-sized one at that.

The MiniLab 3 doesn’t look terribly totally different from its MKII predecessor. Its corners are barely extra rounded and it ditched eight of its 16 encoders for 4 sliders. But in any other case, it retains the identical common setup. You nonetheless get 25 velocity delicate keys, eight velocity delicate RGB pads, in addition to mod and pitch contact strips above the keyboard. And there’s nonetheless fake wooden panels on the aspect that give it just a little little bit of a novel aptitude.

The {hardware} itself is what you’d anticipate for $109. It’s plasticky, however not low cost feeling. The knobs and sliders have an honest quantity of resistance and the keybed is barely springy. All of that is mainly par for the course, and different equally priced controllers have their very own professionals and cons. The pads and keys on the MiniLab are higher than the LaunchKey Mini MK3, however its arpeggiator isn’t as distinctive and its integration with Ableton Live isn’t as tight. While the Akai MPK Mini MK3 has far and away the most effective pads of the bunch, its keybed is nothing to put in writing residence about and its integration with DAWs is extraordinarily primary.

The integration with DAWs has been improved on the MiniLab 3, although. Arturia has put further effort into enhancing this over the past couple of years and we’re beginning to see a number of the fruits of that labor. The accessible controls have been drastically expanded for a lot of apps with scripts which are personalized for particular DAWs like Ableton Live or FL Studio.

The arpeggiator is fairly stable. I don’t suppose it’s fairly as fascinating because the one on the LaunchKey Mini MK3, but it surely’s hardly barebones. It has six totally different playback modes, swing and gate controls, in addition to your customary octave and time division choices. There’s additionally a chord mode that permits you to play full wealthy chords with a single finger.

If you’re tight on area and don’t plan to pull your controller out and about with you, the MiniLab 3 is a superb choice. While Arturia calls it moveable, it’s simply large enough to be just a little unwieldy in a bag. And I’ve some considerations about how these faders would maintain up getting jostled round with different stuff. If portability is your major concern both Novation’s LaunchKey Mini or Arturia’s MicroLab are in all probability higher bets. But for those who simply need probably the most controls within the smallest quantity of area whereas additionally getting stable software program integration – particularly with Arturia’s Analog Lab – then the MiniLab is the way in which to go.