Catherine Darrow
30 de diciembre de 2025
Thoughtful Design and Good Value
This is a great little keyboard. Entirely functional for making music, and a great value.The action is the cheap, springy, spongy action typical of lower end electronic keyboards, but as keyboards of that sort go, I found it well designed and very usable. I did not find it stiff at all. If anything, the touch was a bit on the soft side, making the volume on the keys all or nothing until I got used to it! But I found it very functional and responsive once I had some time with it, and had no trouble making music. I was worried it would feel like some of the cheap keyboards I've used, with no resistance, but that's not the case - there's definitely a springy resistance to the keys. It's not a fantastic feel or anything, but it is perfectly functional. For the class of action that it is, and at the price point, I was very pleasantly surprised.The keys are a little narrower and a lot shorter than a full size piano, so it is easy to accidentally strike them near the top. Attention needs to be paid to that while playing. This does have the tremendous upside that the keyboard itself is surprisingly small. Smaller than a computer keyboard. In terms of portability, this means functions more like a large tablet than a small piano. It can go *anywhere*. On the couch, in a chair, in my lap at the computer, even holding it with one hand and playing with the other. It is a tiny instrument. I am not used to being able to carry a keyboard around like a little flute or something. That's very fun.It has an abundance of features at the price point, too, including an octave button, pitch bend, and sustain button. I was hoping the pitch bend would be a wheel, but it is a 4-direction joystick like you might find on a game controller, which I found a little difficult to control when I had it mapped to a full step and wanted to bend a half step. Usable with practice, I think. I found the pitch bend and sustain worked out of the box with a couple pieces of software, without even mapping them. Very nice.It was plug and play via USB with my linux system, which was lovely. It was also plug and play with my (Android) phone, and even came with an adaptor for that! Throw a $3 synth on the phone (DRC) and now I'm truly grooving on the go and for cheap.Thanks, Donner! Truly. For serious recording, of course, I'd want equipment that costs 10 times as much, if not more. But for casual grooving and cheap entry into the world of midi controllers, this is a great little piece of kit and it was clearly made with thought and love.Ver másVer menos
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