Novation Impulse 61

Excellent

As a media composer and a film music composer this midi device is just excellent!

Nice Midi controller

Very good Ableton Live integration. I believe it is a key benefit.

Works good, no problems ever.

Feels good; looks bad

If I were buying for looks, I'd have got something else. I'm not a fan of the redand grey ribbed end cheek things. But, in terms of playing, it's lovely. All the controls feel solid but smooth and responsive. I gather ther internal processing of controllers is at a higher resolution than MIDI, and they do feel smoother than most controls on master keyboards in this range. The pads are good and the pressure is very controllable; the faders are easy to use for fine parameter control, and the weighting of the keyboard is, for me, nicely balanced between having enough weight to make it possible to control the velocity properly and being light enough to play fast parts without too much physical effort.

I bought it specifically because of the two pedal inputs and the 5-pin DIN MIDI input, which a lot of master keyboards in this range don't seem to have. It means I can use my old stage piano as a second keyboard without having to plug in a separate MIDI-USB box.

Assigning controls is very easy, and the workflow in general seems pretty straightforward. The features do seem a bit limited, and the LCD display is a bit cheap-looking, but if, like me, all you need to do is assign all the controls to whatever note, controller and channel you want and get on with playing it, it's great.

I haven't used the DAW controls yet, because I'm happy using my laptop for that stuff, but, as a performance keyboard, I'm very happy with it.

Disappointed

I recently bought an Impulse 61 and after less than a week it started acting really weird. The keyboard is constantly sending random data to my Daw. I can not assign many controls. The led screen glitches with some random numbers. I do have the newest firmware and together with the customer support we tried to sort it out, but they assured me that I experience an hardware problem. I was impressed with features that Impulse 61 offers and that would have contributed a lot to my workflow but unfortunately I am not lucky and I have a bad unit. Now I have to send it back to the service and wait more than 3 weeks. This is little disaster for me.

Could be better

I ordered this about 5 years ago and I have used it very rarely. Build quality was very good but this was not a midikeyboard that was helping me to explore new sounds.

I like it a lot. It has a good key sensitivity

Plastic

no tutorial for set up.

A lovely keyboard for getting started in digital music

Very easy to set up with ableton. Looks appealing and makes you want to play around with it. Nice features between the faders, buttons and controller knobs. The only issue i found with it was the drum pads felt a bit stiff and hard but overall a very nice keyboard

Great. I'm very happy.

Great!

It's been a few years since I bought this beauty and I must say I am pretty happy with it.

The touch and feel of the keys is amazing! The construction its robust and good looking, really good quality.

About the software, I have nothing to say against it. It only takes a few minutes and it will automaticaly assume all of your plugins so that you can use them with your knobs and keys.

I definitely recomend this midi keyboard, I believe it is the best in this price range!