Many will say that music production has reached a point where DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations = independent keyboards) are almost obsolete as independent units. This is something that many musicians have been trying to convey to the three big players (Yamaha, Korg and Roland) but it seems that these companies still believe in their monopolistic ability to milk the market bringing out technology drop by drop.

The fact of the matter is that technology has advanced beyond the expectations of these companies and most importantly has become cheaper! We are all used to DAW keyboards working in close relation to PC software programs but today VST (Virtual Instruments) packages are becoming stronger and stronger by the moment. Head-spearing this trend are East West packages that feature virtual instruments that are exceptionally realistic and have multiple articulations. --you can find information on these packages within the website- This comes to no surprise since a dual core PC with 2 Gb of memory is several times stronger than any flagship DAW keyboardYamaha, Korg or Roland offers. This on its own is a great drawback for the consumer: why pay several thousands of dollars for a DAW keyboard that is outpowered by a 200$ PC?

So at this moment in time we have a series of wonderful VST packages I will present to you that need only a PC, Software DAW, sound-card and Midi controller to use! 

The only company with foresight worth mentioning is Open Labs that created the exceptional Neko and Miko that are keyboards and PC 2 in 1! Yes you heard well these beauties are powerful machines utilizing a Windows OS that can take any software program (like a DAW i.e. Cubase) and any VST software package either standalone or as a DAW plugin. This is the future of music production and lets hope that sooner or later DAW keyboards will have built-in PC OS capabilities or at least the ability to take VST plugins.

FAMOUS VST PACKAGES (click a vst-package for info):

zxczxc