Recommend a USB MIDI controller for me?

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by TweakHead

I wasn't being serious with my last post! But that's interesting: always thought Novation would use their best quality keyboard on the Nova, since it's their most expensive product in the market.

With a synth like the UltraNova, product direction can go one of a only a couple of different ways:
....they could add in more features like 61-key Fatar keybed, multi-timbral support, maybe a second DSP, FM synthesis, and other items so that it competes head on with Virus, Nord etc, but at that point they have created something that would probably need to cost at least $1800-2200 on the street.
But at that price point they are kind of competing with the legendary Virus when folks go to choose a primary synth (okay some folks would say the "Nova" name is brandworthy enough to compete, but it would still be a risky move). In other words, for today's typical electronic musician, we tend to have a couple of HW synths that matter and do everything else with soft-synths. Most folks do not line their walls with 76-key keyboards the way we did not too long ago. We tend to look for one primary synth that can act as master controller that has enough keys and the control options we need, then everything else is mostly a rack module.
So, I think the product thinking was that the UltraNova is probably not going to replace everyone's primary controller, so its better to increase sales by keeping the price low. And, since probably nobody (or few) are going to use 37-keys as a primary controller, why put a lot of money into the keys?

I'm sure if they saw huge demand for a 61-key UltraNova they could accommodate, but the thing is that if you want to control the UltraNova with a 61 Fatar keys, you can just add the MKII to control the UN like a rack module and put the UN out of reach if you wanted.

Although, and this is on my list of experimentation items, I do not yet know if I can control the touch-knobs on the UltraNova in real-time using the touch-knobs on the MKII. I know it's fully possible hardware-wise, and it should be seamless, but I just don't know if Automap supports it. On the Ultranova touching a knob means "modulate in real-time", while on the MKII its more about just revealing the parameter that knob controls.