Edirol A-300Pro MIDI keyboard 32 keys USB

not what we exoected

I bought this as the primary MIDI controller for my bedroom recording set-up and have been very happy with it so far. Knobs, buttons, sliders and keys are of a decent quality and have a nice feel about them, with just the right level of resistance. The biggest issue I have is with the 'dynamic pad', which I sometimes find doesn't respond the way I would like, skipping notes/beats here and there. The manual is also a bit daunting for those like me who have no experience with MIDI, as it seems to assume prior knowledge. I wasted a fair amount of time trying to work out how to program control maps and the like, before realising that I could just make the settings in my DAW. The keyboard looks like it would be a good size to travel or gig with. If I had the space I would have probably bought the next size up though, just for the extra range on the keyboard. Fortunately there are convenient buttons for transposing up/down octaves, and you can also transpose by semitones - useful if you like playing pentatonics and find it easier using just the black keys. As a side note, I'm using this on the Windows 8 release preview. The drivers didn't work straight from the disc as they detected it was not a supported OS, but with a bit of searching the net I found a workaround which works perfectly.