First impressions.
Heavy. This thing is well made, no doubt. Keep box cutters and other pointy objects away though. I think I'll keep the door closed to make sure my cat doesn't wander in. It does feel great. It feels better than great. It feels right.
Software download and registration is a pain in the butt. Somehow the Dashboard app refused my email until I reregistered (I got a message that my email was not registered... even though I clearly got an email from them to that address) using my Facebook account. :/ That could have gone way smoother.
Setting things up is a bit of a pain in the ass as I'm using Live. I can live with that. I knew what I was getting into. The tutorial video (which I had to search around for) is good and clear. Where's the Equator plug in? Search around for that. Come on Roli. Let us choose our VST folder please.
The Equator plug in sounds very good. ROMplerish, but good. To be fair, I'm stuck on preset #2 "Mellow Duduk." Why am I stuck on that? Because it is just so damn f'n fun to play and it sounds amazing.
Here's what I love about it.
- I know how to play it. You do too, if you play a keyboard. I had a Push for a while and it always felt weird doing chord stuff on it.
The response is fantastic. It feels like a musical instrument. I had a Starrlabs guitar like controller and it felt like a toy.
It's beautiful.
- Packaging. It's just a lot of waste. Yeah, it's beautiful, but all I remember was how difficult it was to get it out of the box. We don't all need to be Apple.
No black and white key designations and narrow spacing will make it take a bit longer to get used to. In a dimly lit room it's not all that obvious where the apex of the hump is except for on the black keys.
Streamline your onboarding process.
Work with Ableton to make sure things like this can work more seamlessly.