What are peoples thoughts about animates keyboards on synth GUI's?

For me - I think they're unnecessary, make a larger file-size, consume more CPU.
I can see what keys I play on my keyboard... why another screen image?

 

If you think that a virtual keyboard on a virtual synth is packing a cpu hit worth mentioning, you should start shopping for another computer.

It's convenient for people while doing sound design, those who do not even use a controller, and DAWs which do not have a floating keyboard you can type notes with.

 

An old shipmate who lost his both hands to Belgian pirates, admitted one drunken night off the Barbary Coast that he loved those keyboards because if he got drunk enough, it almost seemed like he was playing.

 

Last edited: Jan 19, 2026 at 10:57 AM

what goes into an instrument isn't necessarily what you play on your keyboard. Arpeggiators, plugins splitting the keyboard (organs, ..), rerouting to other MIDI channels, transposing, playing full chords or sequences on single key presses, ..

 

but those 2 kilobytes for the key images!

 

Some users find it very helpful to know which note they're playing, and a GUI usually looks better with keyboards.
Every manufacturer does what they want; some do a great job, and some don't.

Of course, I think it's great when manufacturers provide one or more interchangeable skins.
There's a lot of room for improvement in terms of quality and appearance.

Some virtual software synthesizers also allow you to hide the keyboard.
However, the increased CPU consumption and file size are barely measurable.

 

"... it's great when manufacturers provide one or more interchangeable skins... "
Yes you're right.

I realize I'm coming from a background of low-level hardware programming... CPU (assembly level), trying to squeeze the most juice from every clock cycle... OCD you can name it @_@

 

As they say, you can always optimize something. However, you can also overdo it and over-optimize things.
What helps against that is to give yourself a new task or a different approach to a problem.

 

2 GigaBytes in Arturia synths, mate. Anyway, I prefer to have an option to hide the virtual keyboard because it usually takes up too much screen space, and I rarely use them. It depends on your use-case.

 

Like @SineWave and others said, as long as you can hide it's fine. But sometimes is useful

 

It's 1.1 KB and +0.2% more CPU when it's vector-based