Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)MIDI keyboard controllers are cool and have their use. Workstation keyboards are an overkill with dozens of features that I don't really need and are priced to match. Now here comes E-MU out of the blue with a brand new performance keyboard with no unnecessary frills and priced for us starving musician types. Included are two sound banks. A General MIDI bank that seems to mimic the Roland Sound Canvas but with the much better and fatter E-MU sounds than those in my old Roland SC-55 Sound Canvas. And the Keys bank of 64 preset sounds I can tell are from the old E-MU Vintage keys MIDI module or from their Vintage X sounds for Emulator X. The keyboard has responsive keys and a great and beautiful sounding piano that I was told is from the Platinum 88 Steinway that they sell for Emulator X. What a treat it is to have all these classic vintage sounds at your finger tips at any time without needing to use a computer and yet have both MIDI ports and a USB port for use a MIDI interface with a computer or to use the keyboard as a regular MIDI controller.
Like a lot of the less expensive keyboards these days, the LONGboard keys are little loud as far as mechanical noise, but the overall build feels good and solid. The buttons and knobs are easy to see and get to and seem to pulse at you. The small LED display is nothing fancy but seems to get the job done. Both the Keys bank and GM bank sounds use a col/row matrix for quick and instant sound selection but the GM bank presets are not silk screened on the top like the Keys bank presets are so you will need a reference chart to know which presets number is what. Not sure why that is, but that is not a big deal for me as I mostly wanted those great classic vintage sounds to use on stage or band practice without having to use a complicated MIDI/PC/Controller setup.
This keyboard can be USB, wall or battery powered - nice. The pipeline wireless capability seems like a pretty cool feature, I'll have to try that soon...
Click Here to see more reviews about: E-mu 61 Longboard
The E-Mu LONGboard 61 MIDI Controller combines a great-feeling, 61-note MIDI controller keyboard with a 128-voice professional, sample-based instrument with 32-bit effects and a world-class 64MB sound set. The LONGboard 61 keyboard features a 64MB sound set containing a complete range of classic keyboard instruments such as: Grand Pianos, Electric Pianos, B3s, Clavinets, Solina-Moog-OB-Prophet-Juno-TB synthesizer leads and basses, as well a General MIDI sound set. Sounds can be modified during performance using six controller knobs, pitch, and mod wheels and the octave transpose buttons. The LONGboard is based on the E-MU 8030 platform, which performs super high quality pitch interpolation for 128 voices, as well as generating 256 envelope generators, 128 LFOs, 128 low-pass filters (12dB/octave with resonance), 128 DCAs and 32-bit effects processing.
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