After a week of seeing ads on Facebook for this thing I decided to check it out and do some research.
What the fuck?
Apparently these guys are a division of ROLI. (Woohoo, more avant-garde crap)
Why is the website almost a 1:1 copy of Ableton's site?
How can they be so bold as to charge 300€ for a 24 key MIDI keyboard with LEDs that seems to have terrible barely-sensitive plastic-y keys?
I watched some reviews and first impressions and I'm staggered by just how much hype this piece of junk is generating. A lot of the reviewers talk about it as if they've never had a MIDI controller before or as if they've never seen something like Synthesia or piano tutors in general. They all have this disingenuous and fake sense of exaggerated wonder when talking about all the "features" and it's incredibly irritating.

Shit like this makes me genuinely angry.

 

well, it's not meant to be a midi controller. it's a teaching tool. you're not just paying for the plastic-y keys. you're paying for all the work that went into creating the teaching library that comes with it.

but, in general, i never pay much attention to facebook ads or twitter ads because there are so many shady companies selling overpriced crap that you can buy for a lot less on legit sites like amazon.

 

A very expensive teaching tool that doesn't even seem to be marketed as such. At least not by the people who are supposedly sponsored by LUMI themselves. The app itself seems like some sort of 3D Synthesia (dear god imagine all the work that went into it) with a bunch of popular songs you can choose to play. Hardly revolutionary. There are dozens of apps like that.

 

I have a Nord electro 6D. wonderful instrument--but I would still like to have the big Seaboard.

 

Per-key pitchbend and polyphonic aftertouch, and illumination on the keys. You won't find any of these on cheap keyboards. Actually, only Hydrasynth has poly aftertouch on the market right now aside from other MPE stuff, which is usually way pricier than Roli products.

 

For Roli the priority is fancy, then cool and then nothing. That Lumi keyboard seem to designed for Roli Blocks, which is something I still don't know what it does. Glorified Bricks??

It's true that they also do cool things like the famous Seaboard keyboard. To make sure it's MPE compliant it has like 6 dimensions for every finger. I wonder about the durability.