Studiologic SL88 Studio

I was looking for an 88 keys midi masterkeyboard with a piano feel, that wouldn't make too much noise. I use it for my DAW (Reaper), to compose music with VST's. I'm not a well trained pianist, but took lessons for 3 years and I know how a piano feels. And if I could choose again, I would have made a different choise.

The SL88 is sort of OK.
I own a piano, and the SL doesn't play like a piano at all, but other keyboards that I tried felt the same or worse. I didn't try the most expensive ones though, such as a Doepfer or Kawai.

The keys are a bit hard and muddy to press at first, just like the Arturia Keylab 88 (still MKi back then). Same Fatar TP/100 LR keybed. But after even a few days of playing the resistance is going down considerally. Alas, the noise becomes much bigger as well. After a year of playing, I can hear and feel where my hand is, in the dark and without switching the power on: the lowest keys still have a bit of resistance, and they're much more quiet. None are as noisey as my old M-audio Code49 though.

I doubted a lot back then between the Arturia, which had a few problems with Dead On Arrivals according to the reviews, and the SL88. I've got a bit of regret. I really miss having a pitch and modulation wheel. The tiny joysticks on the SL88 are quite useless: you can never give any nuance to for instance the vibrato of a violin with such a small travel.

I bought a second hand BCF2000 with 100 mm faders to do that now, and a Native Instruments Maschine MK3 for the pads. So with the Arturia, twice the price of the SL88, I would have spend much less money, and also I'm still not sure where to park all this equipment.

My old footswitch doesn't work on the SL, as Studiologic wants you to buy theirs for extra $$. I hate that. Oh, if you want faders, you can get Studiologics SL Mixface, but don't do that. You can't assign any new CC number to those faders, which in my mind is the only reason why you would buy such a thing. They don't seem to have any idea of what their users want, apart from having okayish keys for a low price.

Still, not everything is bad. You can set sensitivity of the keys, there's aftertouch, it's cheap, the build is not bad apart from being a bit noisey, and nothing broke so far. Or did it? I've got a problem with double midi notes being sent, that I could only solve by switching off one of the triple sensortechnology...

It's such a pity I can't control my DAW with my 120 year old piano. The SL keys are much slower than my standing piano's, they feel plastic, you really need to hammer to get more then just a low volume, and they make much more noise when playing softly then the old piano, that has much and much more dynamic.

But at least you don't have to tune this one, and my old piano, well, sadly it's too old to tune, and my piano tuner gave up on it.

End verdict: this is not worth more than its price. It's quite OK for the cost, but don't expect too much.

Disclaimer: I had to return the keyboard after 2 weeks of use because the D4# key started producing a strange mechanical noise and became flappy. Then 2 other keys started to have the same problem. This is possibly a defect in manufacturing; things like this happen from time to time, I guess, but anyways...

I played for 2 weeks, 1-3 hours a day, so I had plenty of time to explore and experience the keyboard well enough. My thoughts

- Very weighty keys (I like that!), with a lot of dynamic range, perhaps a bit too much, because I had to hit really hard to reach no more than a velocity of 100-110. This can be configured from the SL Editor software. I set all keys to +30%, and it became playable. Then I wonder why the default option is so unusable, which brings me to my second point

- You have to spend quite some time fiddling around to set up everything in the SL editor. For instance, the default patch, for some unknown reason to me, outputs doubled MIDI notes. I had to reconfigure the template by removing the other 3 instruments, leaving just the first one.

- After I did that, I had no more issues than the malfunctioning D4# key (I attribute that to a fabrication defect in that specific unit; it came like this)

- Joysticks instead of pitch/mod wheels... Many manufacturers tried literally reinventing the wheel, but it simply doesn't work. The problem is these joysticks have very little travel distance, which makes them hard to operate. Also, they are very loose; I expected them to be more stiff. In theory, this is very flexible and I initially liked the idea, but as I said, nothing beats the good old wheel (for me)

- Keep in mind this keyboard is around 2-3 times less expensive than the high-end NI and Arturia, so don't expect miracles; what you pay is what you'll get.

Oh, and one more IMPORTANT thing. People here compare it to a "real piano" like there is only one piano in the world to compare to. There are thousands of "real pianos" that don't play anywhere near one to another. To say it doesn't feel like a "real piano" is not very accurate statement. So, try. That's the only way to tell whether you like it or not.

with owning it just an hour, some of the keys have become clicky, from play non aggressive... Id consider returning it even but id have to pay for the return fees myself and id haveto spend another 70 quid just to get a replacement....
it looks sexy sure but its deceitful, its not sexy, the keys seem ridiculously hard compared to a piano.. sometimes ill press a key and ther eisnt even sound! i feel like i have a faulty product potentially but i dont want to spend that money returning, which i dont know why thomann didnt include in the pricing themselves... i feel cheated from my own personal purchase.
i guess this will just be a practise keyboard until i am rich

what features?

I've owned this keyboard for a few months now. I bought it because I started playing the piano, and I needed a cheap solution to practice. That means I'm not a proffesional keyboard-player, and you have to read this review in that manner, I don't have a lot of experience playing other keyboards.
So, the SL88 Studio is fine for it's price. It does the job without too much complications, but there is already one key that gives an extra noise that shouldn't be there. I don't know how this will evolve in the future, and I'm aware that you probably can't expect more from a keyboard at that price, so overall I'm quite happy with the performance of the Studiologic.