Review: MOTU Electric Keys 1.0 (Mac/Win)

Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Babz

           
 

WHAT'S NEW IN THE WORLD OF OLD KEYBOARDS?

BONUS MATERIAL
MOTU Electric Keys Included Instruments

Early electronic-keyboard inventors employed everything from metal tines and spinning tonewheels to strips of magnetic tape. This helped define the distinctive character, quirks, and lo-fi charm so prized by vintage-keyboard enthusiasts, and it explains why repeated attempts to perfectly re-create the imperfect qualities of these electromechanical beasts in the digital age have failed. Like many, I have longed to reclaim the sounds of the electric pianos and other classic keys that I abandoned with the birth of MIDI. I have spent many years buying various ROMplers, expansion boards, sample libraries, and virtual instruments — each giving me successively better approximations of the real thing.

Today, incredibly convincing emulations exist that are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. So what can MOTU's Electric Keys bring to a relatively mature and saturated market? Quite a lot, it turns out, including excellent versions of old favorites and rare lost classics that time forgot.

Plug On In

MOTU's Electric Keys is a sample-based virtual instrument (VI) that re-creates 50 vintage keyboards. All the classics you'd expect are here — the Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, the Hammond B-3, the Mellotron and Clavinet — as well as a large variety of combo organs, string machines, keyboard basses, and other exotic electro oldies but goodies (see motu.com/products/software/electrickeys/keyboards.html for a complete listing). The library weighs in at a hefty 40 GB of 24-bit, 96 kHz multisampled data and comes on six DVDs. I wasn't thrilled that it requires an iLok for copy protection, but I was delighted that MOTU includes one in the box. (Many companies make you shell out an additional $40.) You also get a well-written, illustrated printed manual. Electric Keys is based on the UVI sound engine and can be used cross-platform, standalone, and in all major plug-in formats. It also works as a sound library for MOTU's MachFive 2 sampler. (Using it with MachFive provides additional editing options; more on editing in a moment.)

The user interface is opulent and easy to use and offers two slots to quickly create splits and layers. It is not multitimbral, however, so you need a separate instance for each MIDI track. This limitation is common enough, but Electric Keys has a further limitation: it can receive on only one MIDI channel — channel 1. This won't be an issue if you are working on a single computer, but it could be a problem if you use multiple computers. I sequence on a Mac and host Vis on a PC running the widely used VSTi host Steinberg V-Stack. V-Stack requires that each instrument be on a separate MIDI channel. For my setup, the only work-around was to use a separate physical MIDI port and cable for each instance of Electric Keys in V-Stack, with each set to receive on channel 1. That limited me to a maximum of two instances, because my PC's MIDI interface has only two MIDI ports. (This could also be an issue for other external hardware VSTi hosts, such as the Muse Receptor.) Hopefully, this basic issue can be easily addressed in a future Electric Keys update.

Electric Ecdysiast

FIG. 1: Electric Keys’ attractive skins re-create the look of various types of instruments.

Patches are organized into 12 banks, each of which features a colorful skin that changes with the type of instrument you load (see Fig. 1). The skins are eye-catching and help you keep your Vis straight when sequencing multiple instruments, but it would have been nice if changing skins added instrument-specific control features as well. Instead, the skins all retain the same Volume, Tune, Drive, Tremolo, and other knobs for every instrument. The controls offer quick sound customization, but a tremolo knob, for example, is better suited to a Rhodes than to a Clavinet front panel, where I'd rather see Clav-style controls. (Of course, having such specific controls would have involved more-complicated programming.)

FIG. 2: Electric Keys includes a full virtual effects rack.

Clicking on a front-panel FX jack brings up a full virtual effects rack, complete with Filter, Phaser, Flanger, Chorus, Delay, Reverb, Amp Simulator, and even an imitation vinyl-record effect (see Fig. 2). A tiny E button (which is too small for my eyes) takes you under the hood to Expert Settings, where you'll find synth edit parameters such as envelopes, filters, portamento, and other goodies (see Fig. 3, next page). Missing, however, is the ability to assign LFO to pitch modulation for standard mod-wheel vibrato, which somewhat inhibits the creation of fully expressive lead synth patches (another item for the update wish list).

The synth engine, effects, and layering add up to a powerful combination that takes Electric Keys beyond simple re-creation of old instruments, allowing you to sculpt entirely new sounds (see Web Clip 1). Moreover, hundreds of grab-and-go examples of this power can be found in the factory-programmed Combi patches, which are included along with the 12 banks of basic instrument sounds.