CME XKEY AIR 25 Electronic Keyboard

Product Information

I've read there's some slight latency with it being bluetooth and I think I might be able to detect it indeed but it is so tiny it's negligible. As someone who’s been in the business for 30 years you occasionally see an exciting new product that you know straight away is a gamechanger. It is wonderfully compact and light, and you can get a fab little travel case for it - but today I'd probably get the NI Kontrol M32 in its place. Each issue it brings its lucky readers the best in cutting-edge tutorials, need-to-know, expert software reviews and even all the tools you actually need to make great music today, courtesy of our legendary CM Plugin Suite. Xport Connector: The Xkey 37 comes with the Xport connector which allows you to MIDI out, plug in a sustain pedal and expression pedal to the Xkey, giving you more expression control and expansion to the Xkey.

Initially I gave this keyboard four stars, but have removed all but one because of a very serious defect in the USB port design. I have had one keyboard before which lasted 4 - 5 years and just purchased a new one as the internal USB port became defective. I would imagine that some kind of education pricing (for the original XKey or the XKey Air) could be obtained if you reached out to the company. But do not mistake its lack of weight for a lack of quality – the CME Xkey does everything it’s supposed to with surprising aptitude. Keyboardists have longed for a more portable rig for years and this keyboard fulfils that need with a multitude of uses.

If all my talk about Xkey's compactness has you thinking it might be kind of flimsy, you'd be wrong. A series of rather oddly labeled buttons arranged down the left-hand end of the 'board handle octave up/down, modulation, pitchbend and sustain on/off. Since this is the Air version of the keyboard, it lacks the sustain pedal input of the non-Air version. I haven’t tried having two BLE MIDI sending devices turned on at the same time, so I do not know how the device would respond to two competing devices for its attention–but plug in the WIDI BUD, and turn on the XKey Air, and it works.

A compact USB MIDI keyboard controller for the musician on the move, but with full-size keys and polyphonic aftertouch too! You guys, my home studio now sounds like the Blade Runner soundtrack, and looks like the set of TRON. Jim Williams has spent much of his 56 years working with some of the biggest names in the music business, including Frank Zappa, John McLaughlin and Stevie Wonder. I had issues with other previous portable USB keyboards that I have used over the years (One example was an M-Audio 25 key unit that did not stand up to portable use).

Some producers prefer to switch to a harder velocity when programming drums and some prefer a softer velocity curve, so it all depends on you. This significantly changes the feel from a normal pivoted key, but is probably easier to adapt to than small keys with the wrong spacing, or squishy pressure pads. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.