I have the Xkey25.
This thread is titled "Best keyboard with aftertouch". The Xkey does indeed have polyphonic aftertouch, but it is no way an absolute "best keyboard" - altho it could be, relatively, the "best keyboard to throw into your backpack for something to do when you arrive at the top of Mont Blanc. Or at Parnassus. Or somewhere like that".
The main problem is that the action is probably going to be completely alien to what you (and your muscle memory) are used to with a piano, or a synth, or almost any keyboard hitherto - it is not based on a pivot. The action is like the space bar on a computer keyboard. In addition the actual travel of the keys is little more than a space bar, if that. The result is that it is very difficult to play evenly, whether different keys successively, the same key repeatedly, or chords - the MIDI note-on velocities that emerge have a spread that is not conducive to producing the even sound that you have spent hours, weeks, years working to refine - not with Pianoteq, not with the most expressive of other virtual instruments such as SampleModeling's. I do not claim the situation is hopeless, merely that such hope could come with the cost of a lot of practice adjusting to it. I bought it in the end because the control software eventually got ported to Windows, and I had read that it allowed individual keys to be adjusted in various ways, including assignment of one of 6 velocity curves (4 user-defined) differently to each key. The control software is terrific in many ways, but unfortunately cannot overcome the basic problem of the limited ballistics of the keys; that is your mission (if you choose to accept...).
The implementation of poly pressure I find more tractable, albeit with the same basic limitation as the key ballistics. Using it purposefully requires further cultivation of your keyboard technique. If you thought you knew subtlety, you may discover that this is a recursive notion. However, once mastered, the software lets you choose between having initial pressure at zero, or (having read so far, you will enjoy this) the note-on velocity. And I have to confirm that seeing polyphonic MIDI messages streaming thru MIDI monitor analyzer software is a novelty. But shortlived, lasting only until you decide to record it into your DAW. None of the ones I tried (4 or 5 I think) were able to display the data in lanes as they do for editing MIDI CC messages - the data is recorded ok, but is not available for friendly editing. Perhaps the DAW developers have never managed to find a polyphonic aftertouch unicorn gizmo to test with... Speculation apart, the practical workaround is to remap poly aftertouch into a convenient CC somewhere between the Xkeys and the DAW.
On other hand, simply to look at, the Xkeys is simply fabulous - a really lovely piece of industrial design (IMO). And now that you can get it in 6 different colours, it has transmogrified from kind-of functional wanna-be to the Higher level of bling, I mean, metonymical potential in some social semiotic system or other (as Claude Levi-Strauss would probably not quite have put it). Cheap at the price, if you ask me.
Why did I bother? Bricolage. I have a rare 25-key TouchKeys kit which needed to be installed on a keyboard, and it just happened to find Xkeys as a temporary resting place. Ironic, really, as TouchKeys was meant exclusively to add virtual polyphonic aftertouch to existing keyboards. (It does quite a lot more now - but I doubt the designer ever envisaged the kit with its circuit boards would end up, as it has done here, in a discarded, much hacked-over fridge compartment door. Yes, folks, bricolage is fun; it's like composing - reusing those same old parts over and over again ).
And now, back to topic.
Last edited by hyper.real (17-01-2015 23:42)
