Arturia’s AstroLab series was already amongst the best stage keyboards out there. They essentially put the company’s AnalogLab suite of vintage synth emulations, sampled pianos, and original instrument plugins into playable hardware. But they were ultimately glorified preset browsers. You could lightly tweak patches using the four macro controls, or dial in some effects, but you couldn’t do any real sound design. That’s all changed now with the AstroLab 2.0 update.
The latest firmware adds a Sound Edit menu that lets you dig into the individual parameters of any instrument. It’s not super intuitive to quickly fire up a blank patch from the instrument of your choosing, and these more advanced sound design tools require some menu diving, but once you get there, creating custom sounds is pretty easy.
The quickest way to build patches from scratch is to make a custom category for templates and save initialized patches for each instrument there. For example, upload a basic Moog bass patch template from the AnalogLab desktop app, then you can tweak it to your heart’s content and save it as a completely new sound directly on the hardware.
Since a firmware update can’t add more knobs and buttons, you still have to make all the changes with the four macro knobs and page through settings four at a time. It can be a bit time-consuming, and you’re not going to do a bunch of on-the-fly tweaking, but it gets the job done.
Arturia has also added a new collection of multisampled instruments, including pianos, strings, and brass sections that offer more realistic acoustic instruments. This is one area where its competition clearly outclassed the AstroLab, but this should help close the gap. In total, there are 67 new patches.
Lastly, Arturia has also made a number of small quality-of-life improvements. The octave LEDs will now show transposition, aftertouch has been tweaked to feel more responsive, and app connectivity has supposedly been made more reliable. While connectivity with the desktop AnalogLab seems rock-solid, the mobile AstroLab Connect app seems as flaky as ever.
AstroLab 2.0 is available now as a free update for all AstroLab keyboards.
