The black keys are very slightly raised above the white ones, and all of them trigger consistently along their entire length - again, this can only help in terms of playability. As someone who’s been in the business for 30 years you occasionally see an exciting new product that you know straight away is a gamechanger. Xkey is a unique product in that it's not an exact emulation of the standard piano keyboard, but rather it's an evolution of that keyboard format aimed at modern, digital music-making. If you have other micro USB cables in your house, you can use them with the XKey Air–but I like having cables labeled so you know what device they came came with. The unit in question is a low-profile USB powered MIDI keyboard with the much sought after polyphonic aftertouch that’s compatible with just about everything.

I remember stopping by CME’s booth at TMEA, seeing the XKey for the first time, and showing them the Miselu C.Reverting to the mini keys of my IK multimedia i Rig keys and comparing the two was extremely telling as the CME falls short quite significantly. There are a few others too, but some one them I tried out at guitar center and I hated the keys probably worse then I would hate xkey.

In practice, once I started using my Xkey37 model, I found that my “I'm not really a great keyboardist” playing actually improved! This means that you can use an XKey Air with an older iPad, MacBook, Windows computer…you get the idea. I am an advanced amateur in classical piano and I already have an acoustic piano and a digital piano.One of the really good features of the original Xkey model was the extent to which you could customise its performance parameters using the Xkey Plus support app. At first, this scheme seemed like it would take some getting used to, but I felt like it would be better than the mini keys which I really dislike.

It’s really inspiring that the technology is progressing to the point where the physical connections and configurations are being pushed aside and more focus is being placed on the actual playing. If all my talk about Xkey's compactness has you thinking it might be kind of flimsy, you'd be wrong. Chromebooks being able to use MIDI keyboards over a wired USB connection is a major step forward, and it means that I could teach Music Theory (mostly with Noteflight or Flat. They all work, certainly, with increased finger pressure deepening the up/ down bend or modulation, but achieving any real degree of accuracy is pretty much impossible, since maintaining an intermediate level of finger pressure between 'none' and 'full' is a haphazard exercise at best.Our site uses high-level SSL encryption technology, the most advanced security software currently available for online transactions. Xkey's velocity sensitivity and polyphonic aftertouch were very responsive and felt natural in the patches that responded to them.