NEKTAR Panorama T4 £260
Most controllers will give you some level of DAW control, for sure, but when it comes to instrument control, perhaps the most outstanding ones I have reviewed recently have been the extreme ends of Novation and Native Instruments.
NI has its Komplete Kontrol system, where KK software on your computer effectively allows you to load in an instrument and its parameters are transferred to the Komplete Kontrol hardware for you to tweak. That’s like turning the software into hardware, but it does focus on the instruments rather than the DAW. Novation’s SL MkIII focuses on hardware and software, using an almost multi-timbral approach to controlling up to eight instruments.
Nektar’s new T-range – there’s a 61-note as well as the 49-note on test here – takes a little bit of everything, using its own software shell like NI’s
