Not an endorsement or an indictment but I finally ordered a second Keylab88. I play my keyboard... A LOT, and in very rough situations. Smokey bars, loud pounding rock music (I'm the one pounding), lots of rehearsals, moving it around constantly... it got abused very quickly. And I suspect one of the downsides to having a very light board is it's not THAT road worthy. Ever since my incident with the ash dump (most of you probably remember me talk about that), I've had to constant maintenance to keep ash out of the contacts. That repair finally took its tole and stripped some of the screw threads, board got clinky and jittery, and had to be repaired more often. Had I known a local repair guy (just found one two hours ago), things might have been different. The latest problem is that I realize that a lot of the felt on the weights has become compressed with use, and makes the keys jump and even sometimes double-strike. Probably an easy thing for a repairman to fix, but not for me.
St Paddy's is the biggest gigging weekend of the year (I play for a crowd of 12,000+ on Sat), so thought it best to play it safe and get a backup. Even though I'm going to call the repairman up and bring the Fatar completely back to 100%, I don't regret getting a #2. I do this for a living, and my old Alesis QS8 Beast was a sorry excuse for a backup (played it this weekend... ouch).
