Reloop Keypad Pro- Affordable Bitwig Controller

[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back to another video. So ReLoop asked me last week if I want to review
[00:00:05] the Keypad Pro and I said, well, I'm actually not a hardware review channel. I'm not Loupop.
[00:00:11] I don't have 50 cameras to film this thing like an ad. And I said, well, you're actually
[00:00:16] a Bitwig channel and this one has a nice Bitwig integration. I said, that's great. Please send
[00:00:20] it over. And guess what? That's exactly what they did. They send it over. So this is how
[00:00:27] it looks like. And that's basically the story for the intro. So this is the Keypad Pro dog
[00:00:34] controller. It's a cheap one. So it's not expensive. But it's not the bad thing, you know, in the club,
[00:00:40] everything can happen in the club, right? Beer flowing around, smoke, dust, moist, people are
[00:00:47] exploding into emotions or whatever happens there sometimes. So what I want to say is these
[00:00:54] controllers can get hurt and you don't want to have a controller in the club that is two bucks or
[00:00:59] two K bucks or whatever expensive these controllers are. So yeah, that's not a bad thing. And it's
[00:01:06] also not so cheap that it feels like it's, you know, breaking apart from itself. It's, it works.
[00:01:13] So everything is on there that that you want in such a controller. So we have keys here. These
[00:01:21] are by the way, velocity sensitive, which is nice. They're also very small, which is okay for me if
[00:01:29] I want to use it on a small desk like my Linux desk there. There are some controls here, some
[00:01:36] finger drumming pads, we have some sliders, knobs, dog controls, modulation, pitch band on the right
[00:01:46] side here. There is a foot controller you can attach and also here a MIDI out if you want to
[00:01:51] connect some synthesizers. And on the back here, there's a main USB input and also here a small
[00:01:58] little USB hub. So you can attach additional devices. We have an on switch of battery powered or USB
[00:02:05] powered battery powered. Yeah, can attach you some batteries down here. So you can use this without
[00:02:12] USB if you just want to power or if you want to control some analog synthesizers without USB, you
[00:02:18] can do this. So yeah, that's basically the controller from the outside. And I also just
[00:02:26] noticed this camera, it looks like it films my crutch, which is not the case. It just is on the
[00:02:33] device itself just to make this clear. So on Tomah here, you can see it's currently 209 bucks in
[00:02:42] Europe. I don't know how expensive this is in America, probably $2 million or whatever. The
[00:02:50] current tariff is there. I have no idea. So it's currently on sale. And down here, there was some
[00:03:00] kind of review by Swedish guy and he likes it. I have no idea who this guy is, but he likes it,
[00:03:06] okay. And he also likes the Bitwig integration here, which is exactly what we want to test today.
[00:03:14] I also can see I have also an affiliate link. Maybe I put this in the description. I never used
[00:03:20] actually this because I don't do hardware reviews. I put this in the description. Maybe this makes
[00:03:24] me rich. I have no idea. So in Bitwig, what we need to do our first I want to show you also here
[00:03:33] the device itself. What we want to do in Bitwig is of course go to the controllers page here. And
[00:03:39] we want to connect here this first with USB cable, which is not prepared at all. Okay. And then
[00:03:50] switch this on. Okay, light show. Nice. It shows me here already the keypad pro and input and output
[00:03:58] is already connected. If this is not showing up for you, you have to add the controller here
[00:04:04] manually down there, go to Reloop and then select your keypad pro and then you can add it, right.
[00:04:11] But usually it's just recognized by Bitwig itself usually. And sometimes if something doesn't work
[00:04:20] in Bitwig with the MIDI controls, make sure you just switch it off and you switch it on again.
[00:04:25] It's not a joke. It's not the IT crowd choke. It's it's it works. Trust me, at least on Windows.
[00:04:32] It really works. Okay, so let's try out your master fader. Nice. This works. First track fader also
[00:04:43] works. And we probably don't need an audio channel here and only need this one. Okay. So this looks
[00:04:52] like it works. And we want to also actually here just make sure it's sharp enough. Okay. Let's add
[00:05:05] here some kind of synthesizer polymer. Would be nice to have this kind of controller with the
[00:05:14] keyboard here. I mean, with a real keyboard included in this. So we have everything in just one
[00:05:19] one device. Okay, so we can arm this track here. So we can play it. And like I said, this is velocity
[00:05:32] sensitive. Can amplify this by using the slider. And you saw unison and use the velocity here for
[00:05:47] the modulation amount. Maybe make this longer. Nice. If you don't like the velocity sensitivity on
[00:06:03] this keyboard here, you can just switch this off with this button here velocity. When this is off,
[00:06:10] all the key presses here are basically maximum velocity, which is probably nice for drums or
[00:06:17] something like by default. This is on. Also, you can see any time I change something here with the
[00:06:26] settings like this, you can see the reset button here is enabled, which means I can press this
[00:06:33] reset button. And it brings the state of this device into its default state. So it's basically a
[00:06:41] polarity panic button. So I have no idea what's happening. Just press reset and you're back to
[00:06:45] your default state. It's just really nice to have. We also have here some kind of additional features
[00:06:56] like an arpeggiator we can activate. So it can hold down multiple notes here. Then it just plays
[00:07:06] some kind of sequence. And then we have here some kind of hold features we can release our keys,
[00:07:16] and it just keeps playing. So there's a hold feature here. If I switch this off, it just stops,
[00:07:22] which is also sometimes nice for drones. But when you press multiple keys, it gets very hard
[00:07:31] to press this. Maybe another try. Maybe change the speech into 16 notes. So it kind of works. Reset
[00:07:59] and reset. Nice. Okay, so that's the ARP. So we can change here also the ARP speed with the
[00:08:07] keyboard. You have here some additional features on top. We have also scales. So we can choose
[00:08:13] between major, minor, pentatonic, and blues. We hold down shift, shift, and then we press here
[00:08:21] major or let's say minor. You can also see the C on display. And then what we play here is basically
[00:08:29] the major scale, C major. This is major. I actually use minor here. This is the C minor scale. So you
[00:08:42] can see I'm pressing here a C sharp, but it's still playing C. If I switch this off, it's C sharp,
[00:08:51] but with scaling here, it's transposing basically automatically all the notes into the right
[00:08:58] position for the scale. So this is also included if you want to use this. So ARP scale, scalar feature,
[00:09:08] also velocity, and we have here some octave switches, which I use all the time with these
[00:09:15] kind of small keyboards. So maybe add here another track. Let's use here my lush kind of pad sound.
[00:09:29] So at the moment here, the pads are in this kind of MIDI trigger mode. We can just play this like we
[00:09:54] play the keyboard down here. So these pads are basically just representing the notes. But we can
[00:10:05] also just say we want to use these pads as a clip launcher. So now you can see we can record here.
[00:10:12] These two are red because this is armed. When you arm here basically the first track, you can record
[00:10:19] this channel or we want to record here just the pads. We had to record, but I also want to enable
[00:10:28] here the metronome. So let's record this. Just playing some notes from the scale octave up,
[00:10:47] octave down, maybe a bass, octave up. And then we want to stop the recording and it just keeps
[00:11:11] playing what we just recorded. Can I actually switch back here to the beginning? Probably not.
[00:11:19] So with this we can easily record things here. And inside of this note clip you can see all the
[00:11:36] notes are all over the place. But we have here the record quantization on inside of Bitwig. But
[00:11:44] if you don't use this, let's switch it off here for a moment and record something different. Let's
[00:11:49] record here the first track. Let's record this with metronome of course.
[00:11:59] And here it's all over the place.
[00:12:21] But we can just quantize this by using here, let's say shift and then quantize. You can see
[00:12:34] it's on the screen all the notes then in the right place. But if you don't want to use this
[00:12:41] feature you can obviously just always here use record quantization in Bitwig and say always
[00:12:47] quantize to 8 notes or 16 notes or whatever. I use this all the time because it's you know,
[00:12:54] it's just helpful. But you can also do it on the controller itself here with the quantize option.
[00:13:01] Maybe use a different wavetable here, the basic. We need just some kind of reverb. Let's use the super
[00:13:24] massive. So what I also found out here with this controller is usually you can see here
[00:13:51] on the track itself when I use here these top buttons. This is usually a panning and
[00:13:57] this is sent one and sent two. And I don't use send and panning all the time. And it's
[00:14:04] also not something I want to access on a controller all the time. I just dial it in once. And that's
[00:14:12] basically it. So yeah, I can change basically the panning. But what I do sometimes is I
[00:14:20] just hear say map controller or key and then I just use this. And now we can see I'm now
[00:14:30] moving here this cutoff frequency. And this is detached. So it's not changing the panning
[00:14:40] anymore. So we can replace or remap this very quickly. You just use here the mapping and
[00:14:47] map it to something else and then the old functionality is basically removed. And now
[00:14:52] we can change here this. Or maybe I want to use this for the index. Maybe let's this on.
[00:15:17] So by default, this is basically panning and send once and two. But if you map it, then
[00:15:21] you can map it to something else, which is pretty cool. I also found that using the clip
[00:15:29] launcher here is cool. But let's say you want to make some drums with this, right? You have
[00:15:37] to use this kind of finger drumming mode here. But you also want to record or change the
[00:15:44] clip launcher, right? So we press record here. Then you switch quickly back to this mode,
[00:15:50] turn your stuff and then you have to stop, switch back and you have to hit the stop button.
[00:15:57] So you have to be pretty fast to switch between the modes and then hit the right clip button
[00:16:03] or clip note clip in here, right? So this is a bit, yeah, not so easy to do in my opinion.
[00:16:12] But for this, maybe you can use the foot controller. So you have a can use your foot basically
[00:16:17] to start and stop the recording. That's probably better. So that's not a problem of the device
[00:16:24] itself. It's something I, it's a problem I have with most controllers. Maybe they can
[00:16:31] add here a button for stopping the clip recording outside of this, right? So you can say clip
[00:16:39] launcher, record, back, drum your stuff and then you hit a different button here to just
[00:16:44] stop the recording. It's not very easy. Maybe I can try this out here. Drum machine, maybe
[00:16:58] I can see a house kid, brakes kid, I have no idea what kind of kid I want here. E drums
[00:17:06] kid. Let's try this one. So right, I want to record this. Let's hit okay. I want to record
[00:17:25] this. So what I have to do is now I have to switch to clip launcher, right? The clip is
[00:17:33] already recording. So I can't basically record in place, which is small problem for me always
[00:17:42] with all kinds of controllers. We can delete this here. So maybe I have to hit stop here.
[00:17:51] This on clip launcher on this. Then I have some preparation time, right? Now we have
[00:18:11] to switch back and I have this and then it doesn't work. But it's not the problem of
[00:18:17] this controller. It's the problem I always have a different controllers. It's the same
[00:18:20] thing. And now we basically have to go back into the clip and you have to change the sizing.
[00:18:25] So it matches basically what you did there length go to four.
[00:18:54] Yeah, it's kind of fun to play around with this, to be honest. Let's hit stop here. But
[00:19:07] you have to kind of practice this because I'm so in my flow with the keyboard and with
[00:19:14] the mouse. Like I said, I'm really not a hardware guy. So you have to really focus on this device
[00:19:20] and remap your muscle memory. So you don't use the keyboard and you use this. But like
[00:19:26] I said, if you use this maybe in a train where you don't have the place for the mouse and
[00:19:31] you have a laptop and you just want to quickly record this, you can really find the flow
[00:19:36] with this device. And like I said, it's also not very expensive. So I want to try this
[00:19:43] out over the weekend on my Linux PC. I'm using Mint there. And maybe it can give you an update
[00:19:49] on this how it works on the Linux. But for Windows, it kind of works flawlessly, in my
[00:19:55] opinion. There are also some features here for the pads, you can switch this into some
[00:19:59] kind of different mode here. I haven't explored actually any everything just showed you the
[00:20:07] basics. There are some more features to this with the Bitwig integration. There's like
[00:20:13] I said, here some kind of scale feature for this for these pads. So you can say I want
[00:20:18] to play all the chromatic keys on here, but here give me give me maybe D sharp minor.
[00:20:25] Then this is the root note. This is the second, the third and so on. So scale mode just for
[00:20:29] the pads. This also kind of works. And it's it's a nice package, in my opinion, for 200
[00:20:38] bucks is nothing, you know, you could be mad about. I want to show you this because I think
[00:20:46] it's a, you know, I'm a Bitwig channel. Like I said, I'm not getting paid for this to do
[00:20:51] this video video. I have to send this back to to reloop next week probably. But it's
[00:21:02] a fun one, fun controller. So I want to give you a nice review, a nice overview over this.
[00:21:08] Maybe give me feedback if how did it, what, you know, are you informed? Do we like the
[00:21:16] device? I don't know. Let me know. Okay. So this is the keypad pro. Thanks for watching
[00:21:21] the video. Like the video, maybe buy one of these devices. I have no idea. That's it.
[00:21:29] Bye.
[00:21:29] Bye.
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