Arturia MiniLab MkII £89

With a reduced library of bundled sounds, can the second version of this miniature keyboard make up for software losses with hardware gains?

It’s been over three years since Arturia released the original MiniLab (8/10, 196), combining a two-octave MIDI keyboard controller with the Analog Lab software sound library. The keyboard itself impressed us with its stellar build quality, while Analog Lab gave it 5000 presets culled from the company’s V range of vintage synth emulations, each with pertinent parameters auto-mapped to the hardware’s rotary encoders.

It’s with some dismay, then, that we have to kick off our review of MiniLab MkII with the bewildering revelation that one of its most notable new features is the ditching of 4500 of those presets in the transition to the new Analog Lab Lite, based on the also-new Analog Lab 2. You can upgrade to Analog Lab 2 from Analog Lab Lite for €89 (or the full-on V Collection 5 for €399), but this is certainly a very uncomfortable downgrade. You do also get licenses for Ableton Live Lite and UVI’s Grand Piano Model D Steinway piano ROMpler, the latter worth €79; but while both are welcome inclusions, we don’t think they make up for the wanton slashing of Analog Lab. Live Lite is bundled with all manner of hardware these days and the piano, albeit excellent, doesn’t feel particularly at home in such an obviously synth-orientated package.

With that understood and taken into account, let’s see take a look at MiniLab MkII on its own terms…

Solid as a rock