88-note Piano-action Controller Keyboard
Reviews : Keyboard
No-one can doubt Fatar's long-established
record for making quality MIDI controller keyboards, but that market has
become highly competitive over the past couple of years. Can the new
VMK188 hold its own against all the budget alternatives?
Photos: Mark Ewing
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Fatar were one of the originators of the master
keyboard concept, and are one of the remaining manufacturers who still
make the actual keyboards which go into electronic musical instruments.
Over the years, they have supplied the lion's share of keyboards in
products by European and American synth manufacturers, and they have
also always had their own line of master keyboards. My main memory of
these was that whilst the keyboards were excellent, the cases were less
good, and the OSs which allowed you to set up what the controller would
do over MIDI were a little clunky.
But it seems that the chaps at Fatar have gone back
to the drawing board of late. When I took the review VMK188 out of the
box, I noted that the former square-ended, boxy look had been replaced
by a sleek rounded case which clearly takes its inspiration from the
lines of a grand piano itself. The curve up from the keys to the top
control panel, in particular, gives the VMK188 a classic look, and drew
exclamations of admiration from the rest of the band when I turned up
with it at a recent gig (I always like to give master keyboards the
baptism of fire while playing live, as this is one of their primary
uses).
However, a product has to strike a balance between
aesthetics and practicality, and one problem became apparent before we'd
finished our soundcheck! One of the things which makes the keyboard
appear so piano-like is the fact that it is not covered in white legends
telling you the function of each button. Instead, Fatar have opted for
embossed legending, using the mould of the control panel to make the
legend for each knob and switch stand up from the control panel. I was
reminded of Hotblack Desiato's spaceship in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
which featured black knobs with black legends on a black control panel.
It may look pretty classy, but it's a devil to read — you have to move
your head around until the light catches the embossed legend so that you
can read it. This is difficult enough in my bright studio where I am
finishing this review, but it's almost impossible on a dark stage or in a
moodily lit control room, and could have unpleasant consequences for
what comes out when you start to play (unless you're planning to join
Disaster Area, of course, in which case it's unlikely to matter anyway).
On powering up the keyboard, the bright blue LED
sprang to life, providing a stark contrast to the rest of the
black-on-black keyboard. Unlike some recent controller keyboards, the
VMK188 does not take its power from its USB connection to the computer —
because it doesn't have a USB connector! Power comes from the supplied 'wall-wart' PSU, which is something of an irritation in the live context.
The VMK188 features nine sliders, like all recent
master keyboards, so I wasn't surprised to see that the first program on
the unit is called 'B4'. However, there was no preset for use with
Emagic's EVB3 virtual instrument (my virtual Hammond of
choice), so I set about creating one. Pressing the Edit button brought
up the instruction 'Press Or Move Any Controls' which was clear enough. I
grabbed the first slider that came to hand (the fifth one) and then
looked in the display. It now said 'Edit Slider S4'. I double-checked
and I was definitely moving the fifth slider. When I tried to move
another one, the VMK188 ignored me. I eventually found that to select
another slider (or any other knob or switch) I had to press Enter, and
then the 'Press Or Move Any Controls' instruction would return.
But I was still confused. Why was the slider
numbering wrong? I eventually picked the first one and found that the
display now read 'Edit Slider V1'. In other words, the designers assume
that you will use the first slider for volume (the rest are labelled
from 'S1' to 'S8'). Trouble is, they forgot to tell the guy doing the
front panel; there is not even an embossed bump to tell you. I suppose
you might reassign it to something else, but the same is true of the
controls at the bottom left of the front panel, which can be assigned to
anything but are clearly designed to be used for transport functions —
and they are labelled with standard transport symbols!
It may look stylish in the studio, but as this
picture ably demonstrates, the black-on-black legending on the VMK188 is
pretty hard to read in anything other than full lighting, which might
make it hard to use on stage. Note also the completely unlabelled slider
on the left of the bank of faders, which is designed to be used as a
master volume control.
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Once you have the right control selected, you use
the Page Up and Down controls to cycle through the five available
parameters: MIDI Channel, Control Change, minimum and maximum Values and
Polarity. To control EVB3, I needed to reassign the Controller
numbers that the sliders were transmitting. Stepping up one menu option
to Control Change, it was a simple matter to use the data-entry knob on
the right of the control panel to dial in the right controller number.
However, I then found that I could not simply touch the next slider and
dial in its value; I had to hit Enter, then touch the next slider. The
display had then reset to show MIDI Channel again, so I had to Page Up
once to get back to Control Change. I had to do that for each of the
nine sliders, which meant 18 extra button-pushes. If I had wanted to
edit the minimum fader value on each, that would have translated to a
further nine, as I would also have needed to press Page Up again each
time. This suggests to me that Fatar's OS designers are rarely in a
hurry!
As I was starting from a preset designed for use with B4,
the polarity of the drawbars was already correct, but this can be
changed if desired. However, on the Fatar you can only do this by
resetting the polarity of each slider individually, rather than with a
single 'reverse polarity' button, as is possible on some recent
controllers. This does mean you can mix and match fader polarities if
you wish, albeit at the expense of the time you need to create or edit
presets.
Knob programming features the same five parameters
as the sliders, but when it comes to buttons, you have a slight
variation. Instead of minimum and maximum values, you have Key Note (for
transmitting MIDI note numbers) and Key Mode, which allows you to
decide whether releasing the button sends the key off message ('Push'
mode) or whether you need to press the button a second time to do this
('Switch' mode — 'toggle' might have been a clearer term). Together with
the reassignable 'transport' buttons, you can set up 13 buttons for use
with each preset.
The VMK188 has three pedal/foot controller inputs
(more than some master keyboards at around this spec/price point) and
these have the same five parameters as the sliders and knobs. Here the
Polarity setting is particularly useful, and could be used to
deliberately invert one pedal but not another. The inputs are all freely
assignable; personally, I prefer to have one 'hard-wired' to
sustain-pedal duties, but it doesn't take too long to program this into
your patches.
Exiting Edit mode is also a time-consuming business.
Firstly, the VMK188 feels it necessary to double-check, asking you if
you're sure you want to do this, and then once you've confirmed that you
do, it takes a good four seconds to return you to Preset Selection
mode. In the comfort of your bedroom, this may not seem like a long
time, but on stage, I rather suspect it would!
The VMK188 does have one control which I've sorely
missed on recent controllers — the Panic button. It's a real friend,
especially if you are triggering a recalcitrant keyboard from the '80s
with a penchant for continuing to play notes long after your song has
finished. Alongside the Panic button is a dedicated MIDI channel button
for setting the keyboard's global MIDI channel (although remember that
you can program individual controls to transmit on different MIDI
channels). This can be set to 'Off', though, which mutes the keyboard
completely, so beware!
The adjacent Bank Select and Program Change buttons
are used to determine which sound you're calling up on your target
instrument, and this is where the VMK188's lack of a numerical keypad
really made itself felt. Dialling in values is more time-consuming and
less accurate than typing them in, and of course if you're as much as
one digit out with a Program or Bank Change number, you could access a
completely incorrect sound.
I have never been a great fan of joysticks,
preferring to keep my pitch-bend and modulation on two separate physical
controls, but I found myself adapting very easily to using this one,
possibly because it is positioned in the centre of the VMK188, within
easy reach of all parts of the keyboard. I was surprised to discover
that the joystick was 'hard-assigned' to control pitch-bend and
modulation; you cannot reassign these functions. I would particularly
have liked the option to reassign something else to the joystick in
place of modulation.
Aside from the lack of numeric keypad, I noticed a
couple of other omissions on the VMK188. There are no Octave Shift or
Transpose controls, although I suppose the thinking is that with 88 keys
you don't need to shift octaves. There are also no Split or Layer
functions. These are becoming a thing of the past on master keyboards
anyway, the idea being that you can set up any required splits and
layers on your target devices. However, I do regret that you cannot
quickly set up a patch to select different programs on two different
instruments; the two MIDI Outs on the back of the unit merely duplicate
the VMK188's single data stream.
Finally, checking through the factory presets, I was surprised to find templates for Cubase, B4 and Pro 53
only. It wouldn't have done any harm to put a few more of the most
popular virtual instruments in, especially as it takes so long to adapt
presets to your needs.
So far this review seems to have concentrated on what the VMK188 doesn't
do. But you might be surprised to learn that my overall impression of
it is pretty positive, and this is down to what it felt like to actually
play it. I tried using it to trigger Ivory, the Synthogy virtual piano instrument I reviewed in last month's SOS, and the results were simply superb, so much so that the VMK188 is now my keyboard of choice for triggering Ivory.
I might prefer other master keyboards with more developed and faster
programming interfaces for triggering synths and samplers, but for use
with piano sounds, I think it's hard to outdo the VMK188. And I suppose
that this is what you might reasonably expect of a product from one of
the world's premier manufacturers of keyboard mechanisms!
In producing the VMK188, Fatar have clearly looked
at what the most recent arrivals in the MIDI controller market are
offering end users, but to my mind not enough has been done to make the
programming of new patches faster and more intuitive. Despite the new
look, there is less programmability and in-depth usability here than is
offered by other master controllers, and it takes too long to set up or
make simple edits to patches compared to doing the same tasks on
competing products — M Audio's Keystation range is one obvious point of
reference. When you consider the higher price of the VMK188 against some
of those competitors, you might think that a buying decision is an
open-and-shut case. However, if you sit down and play a VKM188,
I think you'll find the decision less straightforward. It's clear that
Fatar still do what they always did best: they build playable keyboards
that make performing a pleasure. If your priority is playing, rather
than editing together a whole string of patches to control every last
parameter of a virtual synth, then the VMK188 is probably the one for
you.
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