Future Retro - 512 Touch Keyboard

The 512 is way more than just a capatitive touch keyboard with 29 touch plates, as it has a variety of musical features. It an act as a keyboard, as an arpeggiator, sequencer, MIDI/CV converter and as MIDI/MIDI converter. Simultaneously it can addresses both MIDI and CV/Gate synthesizers because the 512's parameters are transmiited via the MIDI Out and the 3.5mm sockets.

KEYBOARD
The 512 has 29 touch plates with full width of a mechanical key but a little shorter. They respond to Aftertouch and Velocity and the user can define five different curves for these parameters as well as the range, making it possible to adjust the behaviour to his/her needs.
The pitch bend plate allows for bending up or down and its behaviour can be customized as well. A modulation touch plate is available, too.

ARPEGGIATOR
It allows you to generate and to manipulate melodies quickly. Up to 16 notes can be arpeggiated using 29 rhythmical pattern which per step define following parameters: note on/off, note duration, sustain, glide and velocity amount. The range is +/-4 octaves. There are five arpeggio directions: up, down, up/down (including or excluding repetition of 1st and last note) and random. The played notes can be freezed with HOLD and then more notes can be added and define other manipulations: scale, transpose, octave reiteration, combinations of notes or chord inversion. In addition you can control pitch bend, modulatio and aftertouch in realtime.

Its ease of use with step-by-step recording resembles the seuencers of a SH-101 or a Pro-One but expands the possibilities. There are 145 momory slots for patterns and the maximum pattern length is 64 steps. The sequencers hs thesame playback directions and realtime modifications like the arpeggiator and can save the same parametes per step.

MIDI/CV conversion
Converts MIDI data like note On/Off, Pitch, Pitch Bend, Mod Wheel, Velocity, Aftertouch and Clock to CV/Gate. If your connected device doesn't transmit one or more of these parametes, you can use the keyboard to control these in realtime.
You can quantize MIDI notes to certain scales or transpose incoming notes. Also it is possible to set the sync rate via a clock divider and the analog clock can be shuffled.

MIDI/MIDI conversion
Incoming MIDI signals can be expanded by the aforementioned manipulations (Aftertouch, Pitch Bend, Velocity, various scales, transpose) and again emitted as MIDI data.
Besides that the 512 keybaord has intelligent Poly MIDI modes that route played or received notes to different MIDI channels. This way it is possible to play a number of monophonic synthesizers as one polyphonic unit. This works very well with multitimbral MIDI sound modules as well.

other features:
28 memory locations for user-defined scales and one chromatic scale. All these can be mapped to the keyboard and the keyboard scale can be inverted.
Even a chord memory is integrated, allowing you for saving 28 up to six-fold polyphonic chords, to assign them to certain keys and to play them with one finger only.
Besides there is glide, swing, memory banks and much more.