MIDI Keyboard for Digitakt

Elektron Gear Digitakt
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Hey all!
First post here.
Hoping to get some sweet recommendations from ya’ll!

I’m looking keyboard for a keyboard to help me play chords with velocity sensitive keys. Hopefully without breaking the bank. I mainly make 90s house.

I’ve done some lurking and many people seem to recommend the Keystep series from Arturia. This seems like it could work for me but I can’t bare the color white for my setup…

I have found that they make black but they are far too expensive for what they are worth in my region. I also saw the Behringer Swing but this is hard to come by as well.

Are there any other recommendations that you guys use to maybe around the ¥20,000 ($150)?
Maybe some of the Novation models.

Also, I am open to a synth that has a keyboard. (Could invest more money for that)
Digitone Keys is the ideal but it’s too expensive for me right now .

Thanks a ton!

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You won’t be able to play chords on digitakt without some midi ‘magic’ as each internal channel is monopoly / 1 audio channel.

There are other threads related to turning digitakt into polyphonic device. Effectively it needs 1 audio track per note of polyphony.

Otherwise it’s the usual Arturia , novation , native instruments sort of range.

1 Like
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Hi! TBH I didn’t go for the white Arturia either. The cheaper basic black keyboards seem to be discontinued, so I guess Behringer, Novation, etc. like re5et said are the alternatives. I solved it differently by getting an Oxi One. More expensive than a regular keyboard, but for me as someone with no keyboard/music theory experience at all, the One helps me creating nice chords. But like mentioned, the Digitakt (like the Syntakt) has one voice per channel, polyphony is more the Digitone’s territory.

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I’d look at the minilab 3 (black or mint) Arturia - MiniLab 3

Like folks have said though, you won’t get polyphony out of a single track on the digitakt alone. It can record polyphony (4 notes) per track, which can then be used to trigger external gear, but you might be best served by a keyboard that has some sounds you want to sample as well (Yamaha Reface series might be good)

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I bought my keystep 32 for ~50 Euros second hand. I like it and the simple seqencer is actually quite nice! Also it has an arp, which you don’t have on your Digitakt. I think in general the layout is well thougt and has useful features, such as super the quick midi channel change.

The keys are ok. Personally I am looking for a “small” keyboard with halfweighted keys and no additional controls. But this seems to be impossible to find.

I watched just yesterday this video, and it shows a few nice tricks:

PS: In the midi control center you can even select among different random modes. Which I didn’t know until yesterday.

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Awesome thanks for the heads up!
New to it all but I’ll look in to it.