Midi Controller Setup - Arturia Keylab 88 Essential

[Martin Suchan]

Hello fellow musicians, composers and all the other beautiful people lurking through this fantastic community!

 

Some weeks ago, I decided to take my first steps on the long road to my own little homestudio. So in other words.. I am a complete noob. And at some point, a desperate one.

With your help (and some youtube-videos) I managed to learn the basics of using CbB and really like working with it. To improve the quality of my content I decided to buy a MIDI-Keyboard - the Arturia Keylab 88 Essential. And there the problems begun. So far, I am able to use it to play and "hear" my virtual instruments such as Albion One, Analog Lab etc.

But I really would like to set it up properly to integrate it as good as possible in the DAW - precisely because Arturia in fact praised the possibility to integrate the Keylab pretty well in any DAW. Also I ran into some strange issues with it, most mentionable that my modulation wheel isnt really useful because the slightest movement will cause a jump from modulation "0" to "127" and I have really no clue why (even after asking Dr. Google, Youtube and using the search function here). In general: nearly nothing rally works without setting it up the right way.

Long story short: I would really apprecciate your help here, either

- from somebody who managed it to integrade his own Arturia Keylab 88 Essential device in CbB or (maybe even better for general understanding)

- from somebody who can explain me how to set up the device by myself.

 

I tried out some settings before but achieved only.. well.. nothing good so far. Again: I would be really happy for some good advices here.

Be warned: As I already mentioned: I am a complete beginner with Cakewalk, MIDI, Routing etc.  and also I am not a native speaker, thus not familiar with common short phrases.

 

I pretty excited about your answers,

Cheers,

Martin

[Chris Boshuizen]

I can use my Essential 49 for playing just fine, but the DAW control functions do not work. 

[kevro2000]

I'm hoping to buy a keylab essentials or maybe the MKIII (or whatever it is) before the end of the year, and hoping some good responses will be posted here.

[abacab]

I was thinking about getting an Arturia Keylab to control just my Arturia plugins due to the dedicated integration with the plugins, but don't have high hopes for making it control the Cakewalk DAW. Arturia claims that it has a "DAW" mode that supports your favorite DAWs.

Cakewalk has never really had good native integrated support for 3rd party control surfaces. Will probably fall somewhere under "custom" in this case. As in manual setup required.

Forum member @azslow3has created some custom control surface utilities for Sonar/Cakewalk, and is probably the best person to get in touch with regarding this, especially for his knowledge of Cakewalk's limitations and shortcomings in this department.

Arturia  covers  instructions here for using control surface mappings with Keylab  in your favorite DAW.

See yours missing? https://www.arturia.com/faq/keylabmkii/keylab-mkii-tips-tricks

Ableton Live

Logic

Cubase

Pro Tools

Reaper

Studio One

FL Studio

 

Edited September 14, 2020 by abacab

[abacab]

And I just saw this similar thread, that you may be interested in...

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by abacab

[azslow3]

Most DAWs are "supported" by simulation of some Mackie controls. That also works in Cakewalk.

Is that really useful in practice? Transport works, volume can be controlled by faders (unlike Mackie there are not touch sensitive nor motorized, but still), pan by knobs and sometimes solo/mute/rec arm by buttons (on devices which have sufficient number of buttons). But in all cases, that is far from real Mackie functionality.

Also note that Mackie has display, while most "compatible" devices with keyboards do not have any indication (LEDs under some buttons at most).

So the only more or less convenient solution should be device+DAW specific. F.e. there should be on-screen display to show current device layout, commands/parameters should be adopted for particular device and user preferences. Is that possible? Sure. Cakewalk own ACT MIDI provides that for any controller with under 8+8+9 (8 knobs, 8 faders, 9 buttons) controls. Just without feedback on the controller. AZ Controller does the same, but for any controller and with feedback. Both need like an hour of reading the documentation and initial configuration.

The fact is... the number of people which are ready to invest one hour into configuring the controller is almost zero. I mean people CLAIM they need controller, but in practice they do not (need/want). If "ready to use" solution exist, people do not complain. Controllers producers know that, so they simply write "we are compatible with these DAWs", without really doing anything. One-two users will complain the solution is terrible in practice, but all other simply never use that functionality, except may be transport buttons and occasionally changing tracks volume (VST controlling is different topic).