REVIEW
CME UF8
Okay, it’s not a ‘grand piano’, but
it’s a lot more besides.
Text: Mark Davie
We all make big calls sometimes, claiming to be the best
there is on offer at this or that, it’s why confident old blokes
pull women of apparently double their calibre and half
their age with surprising ease. Hype seems to be the public
language of our generation and certainly the only way
marketing departments know how to talk. You only have
to watch late night telly or the Home Shopping Channel to
realise that not many products in the box actually live up to
the claims on the outside of the box.
This looks like a horridly bad opener for CME, whose
controller keyboard, the UF8, I have been playing with
lately. But I’ll explain. The UF8 is one of four Midi
controller keyboards recently released by CME. The
UF8 is the flagship of the series, featuring 88 weighted,
hammer-action keys with aftertouch, adding a greater
degree of control and performance feedback, than its 49,
61 and 76 semi-weighted key counterparts. And this is
where my rant finds its feet in CME’s claim that the UF8
provides you, the player, ‘with grand piano touch feeling…
good enough to play it as a real grand piano’. I was
doubtful, I’m always doubtful about keyboards claiming to
be more than keyboards. But I was willing to give it a go.
After a slightly awkward minute of shifting and gently
placing this aluminium-cased, 88-note monster on a
keyboard stand and plugging it into various Midi devices,
I set about assessing this claim. Playing through a grand
piano patch, in an attempt to impart a psychological
one-leg up, I found that grand piano feel to be slightly
less responsive than I remembered. To make absolutely
sure, I shifted downstairs and sat down to a session on my
Yamaha baby grand to reacquaint myself with the finer
points of mechanical hammer action. Any piano player will
know that weighted hammer action feel, where the key
sticks to your finger as it is prodded at varying velocities
purely because of the balance, design and counterweight of
the hammer section. And it’s hard to fool those fingers into
believing that the friction-simulated action of a keyboard is
the same thing.
Okay, so it doesn’t feel like a grand piano – I guess that
was inevitable – but it’s still one of the better controllers
I have played in both feel and response. Although all
keyboards give Midi velocity sensitivities from 0 to 127, not
many have a refined enough action to deliver convincingly
graded responses across all values. This keyboard allows
you to go from ppp to fff, no problems. And it finds
strength in not completely simulating a grand piano, with
AT 92
the simulated action and addition of a breath controller
NEED TO KNOW
lending the UF series to synth pads and leads.
Price
All the models in the UF series sport pitch bend and UF8: $999; UF5 (49-key):
modulation wheels, eight assignable knobs with preset $499; UF6 (61-key): $599; UF7
(76-key): $699
functions, and nine assignable control faders that include
Contact
preset functions to control volume for channels 1 – 16
Music Link
and as drawbars for organ sounds. The pots are all (03) 9765 6565
centrally indented – useful for pans, not so useful for atdept@musiclink.com.au
www.musiclink.com.au
reverb and chorus effects, but a fair inclusion given the
assignable nature of the controls. The faders are all large Pros
Firewire expansion option.
flat rectangles with a slight concave, providing a quick
Breath controller.
response, combined with large numbers on the LED Ease of USB connection.
display to provide the accuracy, given your fingers cover Cons
the indicator line. ‘Grand piano’ feel is not
everything it’s cracked up to be.
Midi information is sent by a traditional five-pin DIN Summary
or self-powering USB. The implementation of USB A very cost-effective
fully-weighted 88-note hub to
makes getting started a trivial exercise, with the main
a keyboard-centric studio or
preset functions (such as pan and volume) working every on-stage setup. If you’re a piano
time as expected. With some minor assigning, the other player, you now have no excuse
to not have a piano action…
parameters followed suit with relative ease. The transport
even if it isn’t a ‘grand piano’
element I found to work more instantly on some things, dead ringer.
such as the Electribe, better than others, like my DAW.
The layout is suitably restricted and is not overdone,
given the potential for sprawling out over the controller’s
expansive real estate. The mostly black with metallic red
finishing is pleasing and refined, giving the impression of
playing something more than just a controller keyboard,
but suitably unobtrusive.
The optional Firewire audio expansion adds two 24-
bit/192k line inputs and outputs, one mic input with
preamp, S/PDIF digital I/O, an extra set of Midi In/Out/
Thru ports and two headphone outputs for monitoring;
making the UF series into a very useable all-in-one high
quality DAW front-end as well as sequencer controller.
Traditionally, if the piano was your main weapon of
choice, and you wanted the luxury of a fully-weighted
88-note keyboard action some sort of synth of controller,
you’d probably have to sell your car to afford it. No longer.
The UF8 is an affordable controller for those not content
with springy organ keys, yet want the I/O and controls to
interface with a computer or rack full of sounds.
Okay, it doesn’t live up to the grand piano claims but
with the Firewire expansion option, and breath controller,
there’s many other things the UF8 should be boasting
about instead.