Nektar is a company that focuses a lot on making keyboards and controllers, and here we have one of their top selections for beatmakers. Built into the Hammer 88 Pro are features that are essential to creating modern pop, electronic, hip hop, and dance music. Note Repeat and the built-in Arpeggiator open up a world of precise music production and live sound techniques to make your music sound professional. It’s great that there are added features like pads, faders, and knobs on here because for its more affordable price, one would not expect to have so many features for an 88-key MIDI keyboard.

Unless you need it for the performance aspect (a guy with a keyboard plugged into a laptop isn’t as nice to look at as a guy on just a keyboard), you don’t always need synthesizers anymore. The Novation LaunchKey Mini is a compact and portable 25-mini-key MIDI keyboard controller designed for seamless integration with Ableton Live. This lightweight controller fits easily in a bag, making it perfect for on-the-go music production.

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The built-in sounds are great as well, especially the acoustic piano sound (which uses Korg's EDSx sound engine). There are good electric piano and clav samples, along with a drum kit.

Performance controls are few but useful. Dedicated octave-shift buttons double as transpose buttons, there is a split/layer button with selectors for the lower and upper zones, two buttons and two knobs are freely assignable, and two signature Roland controllers are present: The pitch-mod “paddle,” and the D-Beam, an optical sensor you move your hand over in Theremin-like fashion. It can control pitch, volume, or an assignable parameter.

The keyboard uses a tri-sensor scaled hammer action with Casio's AiR sound engine. This combination does a spectacular job of replicating the feel and sound of an acoustic piano. The action is graded, i.e. it goes from heavy to light as you move up the octaves. Synthetic ebony and ivory keys complete the acoustic piano experience (and serve a function purpose – the keytops are moisture resistant). A88MkII has a great design, with Ivory Feel keys, 3-sensor key detection and key-specific progressive hammer action, which all deliver the feel of a real piano. Overall we found this to be a very capable and a competitively priced update, but its winning feature is that the piano action is class-leading at this price point. Given that this isn’t the sort of unit one changes that regularly, it’s also great to be future-proofed with MIDI 2.0 support. In our opinion, the Fatar-sourced hammer action skews a bit on the heavy side—pianists might consider this a plus—but can be lightened up via the 11 velocity curves. Aftertouch, which is also adjustable, had a wide sweet spot and was responsive to subtle changes in finger pressure. The key tops are textured, the keys sit tightly with no lateral wobble, and we just can’t over-emphasize that this action feels far more expensive than it is. The drum pads feel good enough that MPC purists just might not wrinkle their noses here. In fact, it’s better to call them “MIDI controllers” than “MIDI keyboards”. The latter term is simply used to differentiate them from controllers that don’t have piano keys, such as the Ableton Push. Ableton's popular Push 2 MIDI controller (Image Source)

Additional features include a 3-band EQ and a bank of effects and voices (including chorus, phaser, and tremolo). Make no mistake though – this is an out-and-out performance piano, not a general purpose keyboard. You'll want this if you need the digital piano experience. Pots are arranged in two rows of four and are also MIDI-assignable, giving you much more functionality. Their default parameter settings are Osc Tune, Osc Level, Osc Mod 1 & 2, Cutoff, Resonance, Env Amt, and LFO. Below these, you will find the transport controls, including the buttons for Loop, Rewind, Fast-forward, Stop, Play, and Record (which also have secondary functions).The original A88 uses Roland’s PHA3 Ivory Feel-G weighted keyboard. However, since then their whole digital piano range has been overhauled and the latest design (PHA4) comes in three versions – standard, premium and concert. The A88MKII uses the PHA4 Standard action but don’t be fooled.

The keybed is lighter and softer than most for playing drums or other instruments besides the piano. The entire keyboard itself is light and plug and play, and also, the design is not too wide, even though it is long (as it should be for 88 keys). It is also very affordable. Rounding up the feature list is a set of powerful 22W speakers. These are loud enough that you can perform in a small venue without hooking the SP-280 to a PA system. Oh, and did I mention that you get a whole range of Roland's classic electric piano sounds to choose from? This ranges from the 1976 Suitcase Rhodes to the Model 200. The keyboard is not, strictly speaking, a piano-like action. It certainly is weighted, going beyond the usually euphemistic sense of “semi-weighted” to what this term shouldmean. Like the VAX-77, the feel is in the sort of “expensive weighted synth” territory of classics like the Rhodes Chroma and Yamaha CS-80; which is to say, substantial and extremely expressive.

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The two high-resolution color displays are incredible, as you can navigate presets, modify sounds, and view the notes recorded when you play in record mode on the keyboard. Also, the software you get includes Komplete Select (which includes Massive and Monark).