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Novation Remote 25by Novation
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Features
- The front panel is comfortable and simple to use
- There are eight rotary potentiometers, eight sliders, and eight rotary encoders, together with twenty four switches
- A bright backlit two line silver and blue display feeds back all the important control information, from the name of the template selected to the name and values of any controls
- ReMOTE also brings the expressiveness of a conventional keyboard to the desktop, with a joystick for pitch bend and modulation, as well as a touchpad which may be programmed to control multiple parameters in the X and Y axes
Product Description
2-Octave MIDI Controller with Semi-Weighted and Aftertouch responsive KeyboardReviews
A good-value control surfaceI actually have the 49-key model, but the controls are the same regardless of the keyboard size. I chose this after sampling a variety of control surfaces. It has a much nicer keyboard than the M-Audio series, although the key action still falls short of a good quality digital piano, much less a real one. The Edirol keyboard seemed somewhat better, so if that is your main criterion it might be a better choice.
However, the Novation is one of only two control surfaces in the lower price brackets I'm aware of that offer aftertouch (E-Mu is the other), which is a genuinely desirable feature on a synth. Be warned, though, that the Novation aftertouch is monophonic (aftertouch on one key affects all sounding notes) rather than polyphonic (allowing aftertouch to control only the note sounded by the wiggled key).
The second feature of the Novation that clinched the decision for me was the number and variety of controllers -- in addition to abundant knobs, sliders, and keys, it includes a touchpad and an adjustable pitch/mod stick. Finally, the Novation is unusually generous in its collection of MIDI ports, in case you want to add additional hardware later.
The Novation is not plug and play with XP, and in fact getting it up and running was a little bit tricky -- the included drivers didn't seem to work, although downloaded ones did and were accompanied by reasonably clear instructions. The manual is not a model of clarity but does at least appear to have been written by English speakers, unlike the manuals for much musical hardware. The pre-set templates are already a bt behind the times in terms of covering current releases from Cakewalk, Native Instruments, etc. Ironically, although this unit was supposedly originally conceived to be specifically a Reason controller (it evolved well beyond that), its functionality with Reason seems to be a bit iffy; since I'm not a Reason fan, though, I haven't investigated whether the issues reside in the hardware or software.
Novation has quick and friendly technical support through e-mail in case you get stumped along the way. (My own tech support issues did not involve product defects, only a slowness on my part figuring some things out.)