The materials are really great, the keybed is really really nice, i love it, control of daw (Studio One) is pretty good, mostly mixer control, plug-in control for native plugins is quite limited, i would say it's useful only for performing, not production. It's power as controller stands in its software, Nektarine. Let me start with the good part. You can have many many pages per plug-in, letting you control every aspect of your synths and there is a really easy way to navigate, actually there are 3 ways at your disposal: buttons underneath the faders which are prelabled for convenience, but you are not forced in any way to set them as they are named. Another way is hitting the setup button, this will show you all the pages in the screen and with E1 knob you can navigate and select the favorite one. Another way is setting on the buttons underneath the screen, 4 in number, to jump to a certain page or cycle through them. Another good thing is that it's really easy to assign knobs, faders, buttons to anything in your software. You just have to press shift+setup at the same time to enter in learn mode, move the fader/knob/button on your software, next in your controller and it's done. Hit the combination again to get out of learn mode. Now, the bad part about Nektarine is that you only can do all this deep control with the software and you'll have to integrate it in your workflow. If you collaborate, it won't work for you. I would say it's useful if you do sound design or want to learn and do your presets outside your daw. Another bad thing about Nektarine software is you can't browse through presets unless you added them into Nektarine and it's quite a hassle to add them. You have to switch through every preset, for some vsts doesn't even detect when you change a preset so you can't add them at all. I would say preset browsing is really bad and can't recommend it at all for that. A neutral thing is its feature called repeat key. I can't say I find it very useful and guys at Nektar confirmed that they won't transform it into an arpeggiator, which would've been really useful. Same goes with chords which are really basic and hard to hit more than 3-4 keys unless you have long fingers. Why? Because you have to hold a button while you press all the keys you want at the same time. You can't press then one by one, you'll have to keep pressed the previous one. The repeat function it's useful for drum pads, that's the only place I can say you would use it. Now, the keybed is really nice, velocity sensitivity can be set really easy and it has very dynamic keys. Aftertouch is awesome too and with great control, tho is not polyphonic. Another thing I think it's missing is lighting around the knobs, faders and buttons. At night can be hard to use if you don't have good lighting where you've placed it. Overall, for the price, i would say it's a great keyboard. I don't think there is better controller for this price, even more expensive ones. Native Instruments doesn't offer the same control over plugins, doesn't have drum pads, faders and it's more expensive.