Native Instruments Kontrol S61 MK3

The Native Instruments Kontrol S61 is a great keyboard. I wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary from the keybed itself (it’s decent and within the norm), but the real advantage lies in how it optimizes the creative workflow and improves convenience. The main highlight, of course, is its excellent integration with Native Instruments Kontakt 8 — it truly opens new creative possibilities and encourages me to use effects I probably wouldn’t touch without this keyboard. For example, it’s very easy to set up scenes and adjust mic levels in Spitfire Abbey Road Orchestra without even opening the player, and you can quickly make changes to plugins directly on the selected track. The integration with Logic Pro is excellent. These benefits clearly outweigh the average mechanics of the keybed. Hopefully, future models will also include a touchscreen. Thank you, Native Instruments.

The keyboard is well built and feels premium. I personally really like the single screen - I like the simplicity of it. The user flow of searching for what I need is intuitive and encourages me explore and experiment. The light guides are very useful, especially if you're learning, and when paired with some of the tools they make it a really great experience. The polyphonic after touch is implemented in some of the instruments I tried, and does feel like it adds some depth. The keyboard does not include a lot of other features you might see in other keyboards (like pads), but what it does offer is very solid and premium

The keyboard itself would be great, if it worked as advertised.
The problems I'm facing are:
- sometimes, after turning it on, it turns off in a few seconds. It might happen several times after each other. But once it's gone, it's gone, it has never turned off during use (not cable nor connection issue, probably a software problem)
-The knobs are too close to each other, it's close to impossible to turn one knob without touching and turning the neighbor knobs if you have bulkier hands
- Native Instrument software is terrible. More than half of my instruments do not work with the keyboard: if I install any of those instruments, the keyboard doesn't connect to Kontakt anymore at all, unless I uninstall the instruments causing the problem.
- the velocity is too hard. Even if I change it to the softest setting on the keyboard, I still have to press VERY hard to get maximum velocity. Right now I have Fixed Velocity turned off because I'm afraid of physically damaging my keyboard having to press with such force if I want to take advantage of the velocity option. I'm hoping a future firmware update resolves this.
- Native Instrument downloads are VERY slow, a 120 Gb game on Steam downloads much faster than a 20 Gb instrument from Native Access.
- The Kontakt software anyway feels like straight from the 90s: unintuitive and looks/feels terrible on a 4K display. They are decades behind with UX/UI.
- The support is close to non-existent. I contacted them with 4 different issues so far, it's impossible to talk to an agent. Only 1 ticket was created for one of the issues I contacted them about, the others were ignored. Even the support chat robot is not responding for 2 days...

Otherwise, the build quality feels solid, it feels great to play and the extra buttons and knobs are quite useful. It also has very nice DAW integration, so I would be more than happy to use it on a daily basis if I could...
I wish I did not get rid of the original packaging so quickly so I could send it back... I would probably wait at least 6 more months before purchasing this because NI definitely needs time to fix all these issues, and there is a lot.

Yes – it’s premium, yes – the build quality is 5 out of 5, yes – it integrates well with Komplete Kontrol…
But!! All the pros are outweighed by major cons that make you wonder – why should this keyboard cost so much???

Very poor software. I connect the keyboard through a USB hub, and basically, it only works properly with NI products. To make it work with a DAW, I have to reinstall it every time (at least in Logic Pro).

The keybed takes getting used to. If you’re used to a typical synth action, you’ll need to completely adapt to this one. The velocity adjustment is extremely limited, and even in the lightest setting, you can press a key and get no sound at all. I have to play harder than usual, and sometimes quiet notes simply disappear from the melody. There’s no way to fine-tune the velocity curve to your personal playing style.

The octave up/down buttons are uninformative. You never know how many octaves up or down you are at a given moment. They’re also useless for semitone transposition. Considering the beautiful, large display, not showing the current transposition value on screen is a serious design flaw. It would be great if this could be added in a future update – if that’s even possible.

P.S. It’s a real shame that NI engineers don’t seem to read reviews here – or if they do, we never know about it, and there’s no feedback from them. It would be nice to understand whether they plan to fix these issues or not. Otherwise, unfortunately, I’ll have to switch to a simpler and cheaper MIDI keyboard in the future.