Arturia Keystep 37

I would like to start by saying that am only interested in a 37-keyboard midi keyboard with a nice keybed for playing with soft synths (GarageBand, Synth one, King Digital, etc.) on my iPad, connected to my Boss RC-500 looping station. I use a keyboard mainly as an addition to my acoustic and electric guitar(s), also connected to the looping station and amplifier, I do not use the ARP and Chord function. Because of this (playing together with guitar) the Transpose function (transpose whole keyboard up/down semitones) and Hold function (holding a played note) are important to me. And exactly these features, although prominently on the dashboard, are not exactly what you would expect. With the Keystep 37 both these functions work together with the Arp/sequencer and not when playing the keyboard. That is a disappointment, maybe I should have read the 100+ page user manual in advance….

Although the keybed is nice to play I did return the keyboard and, for the time being, keep my Arturia MiniLab III (which has both these features and has a great keybed) as my main midi controller in addition to my Akai Mpk Mini Play (which does not). The Akai I use mainly for the percussion pads, I find the keybed too mini and the keys too stiff.

All the above is a personal opinion and based on the setup in which it is used. The quality of all the mentioned keyboards is very good!

I bought this mostly for the size. As far as I can see there are very few compact, three octave MIDI controllers around, and most smaller controllers have those silly tiny keys whereas this has somewhere a little larger which makes playing much nicer. It is comfortable to play, with enough resistance to allow expression when used with something sensitive to velocity.

The overall build quality seems excellent and nothing stood out as wrong or odd. I have removed one star for features due to the fact that there seems to be no way to dim the LEDs behind the buttons, and I find this quite distracting and uncomfortable in darker rooms as the lights are really quite bright!
One other thing, which may be changeable via some settings that I have not been able to find, is that if used for sending pitch voltage it seems that the higher voltage cutoff is a little badly placed with the keys. If I am in the middle of the keyboard's ranger then I run out of notes when I get to the higher keys, and so if using 1v/octave synths I have to have the controller set an octave lower in order to be able to have adequate playing range. I feel like the voltage range should be set around the middle range of the controller. It's not really a problem (except for meaning I always have to have that octave- LED on when playing synths!).

Honestly I didn't really dig in to the sequencer and arpeggiator a lot as I bought this mostly for playing the keys, but from what I have explored they work perfectly well and the sequencer seems excellent.

No issues with MIDI connectivity, or really anything else that I have not already mentioned. I've had this a few weeks and overall am very happy with it as a compact controller!