Sonic LAB: Arturia Astrolab - New Concept Stage Keyboard

Hot off the press, Arturia just finished up their _25 Years presentation and the main focus of the live stream was AstroLab - which is a new product area  - the stage Keyboard. Designed to fix the issue of how you take your in the box sounds and play them live from a keyboard. These sounds are 27 of the V Collection 9, including modeled pianos, organs but also their software synthesizers  CS80V, Pigments too. So its essentially a player for patches from their software line-up.

You don't need to own any of these to play the sounds, but if you do want to write and save your own presets.

AstroLab has a twin layer setup with a split or layer - each can hold a patch from th4 V Collection, so a piano and say a complex Pigments patch.

Polyphony is 48 voices for physically modeled sounds such as Piano V3, and Tonewheel Organ and 8 notes for Pigments and the other Synthesizer collections (these patches will often include internal FX)

In addition there are two assignable insert FX and two send FX - a delay and a reverb engine.

Sound modification is via four Macro controls which are assigned at a patch level - you cant change this unless you own the software instruments, in which case you can save your own patches and load them into the Astrolab. I should note that as of this version, real-time editing of the sounds on is not possible, you need to tweak them on your computer then send the patches over to Astrolab - we hope this is sorted ASAP as it makes a lot more sense.

For the full product details, check the Arturia website:
www.arturia.com/products/hardware-synths/astrolab-61/overview.

We got hold of a unit a little before release so our review is not exhaustive but its an impressive piece of hardware with a very playable 61 key - keybed.

Price is €1599/£1599/ $1999 available now.

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