There are dozens of excellent MIDI controllers out there for surprisingly cheap. Even Arturia offers the solid KeyLab Essential series for as little as $219. Obviously if you’re looking for something unique, like Roli’s squishy MPE-enabled Seaboard Rise 2, you’ll have to cough up quite a bit more.

If you’re looking for a standard keyboard-based controller, though, it can be hard to justify dropping big bucks. But after a few weeks with the new KeyLab mk3, I get the appeal. Starting at $499, this isn’t the best bang-for-your-buck MIDI controller, but it is a damn good one.

Premium Keyboard for Less

The most immediately obvious difference between the KeyLab mk3 and its Essential series sibling is the build. The Essential is all lightweight plastic. You could pick up even the 61-key version with one hand and fling it across the room. The regular KeyLab is much beefier. Most of the body is still plastic, but it has a metal base and wood cheeks. You definitely need two hands to lift this thing.

The faders, buttons, and pitch and mod wheels are also luscious. Everything has just the right amount of resistance and excellent tactile feedback. Even the beat pads are decent. They’re a little stiff and can’t hold a candle to what you’d find on an MPC or the Ableton Push, but they’re certainly not the worst pads I’ve ever used. My bigger complaint on the pad side is that Arturia cut the number from 16 to 12. While you can have four banks of pads, giving you a total of 48, the standard across many devices (virtual and hardware) is a four-by-four grid of 16 pads.

All of that is secondary to the keybed. Your knobs and faders can be the nicest in the world, but if the actual keyboard part of your keyboard is terrible, then it’s not worth a second glance. Thankfully even Arturia’s cheap controllers have pretty solid keybeds, and the KeyLab mk3 is a pretty big upgrade over those. It’s been completely redesigned and its semi-weighted keys with monophonic aftertouch are among the best I’ve encountered in a sub $500 MIDI controller.

As nice as the keybed is, I am slightly disappointed they didn’t just take the incredible polyphonic aftertouch keybed from the PolyBrute 12 and stick it in the new KeyLabs. I find it hard to believe that Arturia won’t do that at some point, but I assume it will cost quite a bit more than the $599 of the 61-key version of the KeyLab mk3. Polyphonic aftertouch and MPE are becoming more common and are even supported by a number of Arturia’s software synths, so it’s hard not to feel a little let down.

Software Integration

While Arturia’s MIDI controllers are definitely great, the real reason to choose one is its integration with the company’s software, especially Analog Lab. With every revision of the KeyLab series, the ties get tighter and tighter.

The faders and knobs mirror the controls found in Analog Lab. This makes it simple to tweak presets to your liking. The 480 x 320 color screen in the middle of the keyboard shows the name of the preset and the specific instrument (Mini V, Augmented Strings, Pigments, etc.). But it also shows the parameters and their values the moment you touch a knob or fader. This means you can effectively control Analog Lab without ever looking at your computer screen. You can even create a “multi,” either layering or splitting two presets across the keyboard without reaching for your mouse.

You can even browse presets directly from KeyLab, filtering them by instrument, sound bank, or style. Native Instruments offers a flashier and arguably more advanced version of these same tools on its Kontrol series, but I find Arturia’s UI more responsive.

Integration with Arturia’s individual instruments is a little more patchy at the moment. Only some, like Mini V and Piano V, will allow you to browse presets and show graphics, though I’m sure updates will fix that soon enough. Since the interfaces of the instruments vary widely, the way the controls are mapped also can be inconsistent. And for many of the stand-alone instruments there are more parameters to contend with than there are hands-on controls. You can easily remap these to your liking, but it does add an extra step.

The KeyLab mk3 also offers some control over your digital audio workstation (DAW), so long as your DAW is Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio, FL Studio, Cubase, or Logic Pro. Your specific choice of recording software will determine how tight the integration is. I only tested Ableton Live, and things mostly worked as expected. The transport controls allowed me to play and record, and the knobs and faders were automatically mapped to controls for Ableton’s native instruments and effects. The pads can be used to trigger scenes and clips in Ableton’s clip view, and big improvements were also made allowing you to easily select and arm tracks using the main encoder.

Other Goodies

The new KeyLab mk3 has a few other nice features, including scale mode to keep you from playing out of key and an excellent arpeggiator with randomization tools. In addition to serving as a controller for your DAW and plug-ins, it has 5-pin MIDI in and out ports for directly talking to hardware synths. Plus it comes with a solid software bundle, including Analog Pro V, Mini V, Piano V, Augmented Strings, Ableton Live Lite, and more.

Ultimately, the reason to pick the KeyLab mk3 isn’t the arpeggiator (I think Native Instruments' arpeggiator is better). It’s high-quality hardware and seamless integration with Analog Lab. At $499 for the 49-key version and $599 for the 61-key, they’re actually cheaper than comparative controllers from Novation and Native Instruments.

If you’re already a dedicated user of Arturia’s software instruments and want something a little more premium than its plasticky KeyLab Essential series, the KeyLab mk3 is an obvious choice. But if you’re not already committed to a specific plug-in suite, the KeyLab is a solid proposition. It delivers high-quality hardware at a lower price than the competition and comes packaged with some of the finest emulations of classic synths on the market.