Hey there,
First, you question is not stupid. You only learn if you ask questions and the only bad question is the one that you don't ask. I've asked elementary questions of some of the people here and they have been kind enough to give me a meaningful answer and pointed me in the right direction, even if it was elementary to them.
To you (good) question, I am about to give you an answer that I hate to hear, so I hate to give it, but it is kind of true: it really depends on what you want to do.
I am a pianist and would not always be happy if I had fewer than 88-keys that since I often play piano for piano music. But that what the piano is for, and I also have a digital piano that I thought that I would start using for other composition, but I have not really that much. Instead, I have an old 76 key synthesizer that I use as a midi controller because it has modulation and pitch bending capacities (like the mod wheels on many newer controllers). I actually like that spongier response in the keys for playing turns and ostinati with orchestral VIs. So I would (and do) feel limited by smaller keyboards if I wanted to play the piano as a piano, but I am grateful to have the luxury of being able to do that elsewhere and I can use the digital piano to generate my midi if I really want a close to piano feel. If the feel of the key bed (weighted action like a piano) and need for 88-keys to play piano music, then you might be better with a smaller, less expensive keyboard to act as your controller. By the way, there is a steep learning curve to being proficient at two handed playing and many will tell you that you should be very proficient in at least one instrument. That is the best, but you can have a lot of fun and make great music without being proficient at two handed piano. Indeed many people here play other instruments and are self-described ham-fisted pianists and yet make very high quality professional music that is the envy of many, including me.
Where you will be otherwise limited with a shorter keyboard happens in a couple of ways. First, the range of some instruments may be wide than your instrument of interest. You mentioned the guitar. If you have an acoustic guitar VI, for example, you will need about 4 octaves to play the full range of the instrument. My first question is whether you need the "full range" to be able to play what you wanted to play. The answer is "not always." The fortepiano (or pianoforte) in Mozart's era typically had 49 to 52 keys and this expanded to 66-80 keys. So even then, you did not have all 88 keys and that Mozart guy could write some nice tunes despite that technological limitation. Second, if you are a jazz musician, sometimes your main job is to play an accompaniment and you are playing "in the pocket," or in a middle range in the keyboard not at all using the highest and lowest notes. Solos are a different story. And to some extent this holds true for the guitar. There are workarounds for this - most DAWs, VIs, and many keyboards have ways to quickly shift to a different octave using some sort of midi modifying strategy (you play a note and it plays an octave higher or lower). This is perfectly fine if you have to play a high part that does not require a low part at the same time (or vice versa). When you have to switch back and forth, that can be annoying, but you may not have to do that too much if you are going to play parts in separately.
The other limitation is that even if you have the range of the instrument, you may not have enough keys to access the key switches (keys that do not play notes but instead allow you to access different articulations of an instrument - e.g. switching between a long note on a violin and a staccato note, as you would see in many different musical styles). So if you had a guitar VI and a 48 key keyboard (so you had the full range of the VI), you might not have keys to switch between a regular picked string, a palm mute, or some other articulation). But there are workarounds for this too. Many of these controllers have switches and settings that you can map to those key switches so instead needing a key, you use a button or something to switch articulations. While this takes two hands, you are rarely going to need to play two handed violin parts while switching articulations and you can just use your left hand to change the articulation (via a button or a key switch). And this assumes that you are playing all of this into the DAW in real time, but from your post I don't know that this will be the case. And even as a pianist, I often take a couple of passes for instruments other than keyboard instruments (I'll play a violin line in, get all the notes correct, but still have to go back and make a cleaner articulation change or clean up my modulation wheel playing because, well, that is not a piano skill that I learned).
I think that I am in the camp with
@CharlieCee,
@PaulieDC, and
@sostenuto on this - a 61 key keyboard would probably be okay for what I do at the computer without feeling too cramped. And my caveat is that I personally can't use smaller than standard sized keys because I have so much muscle memory in the distance between notes. But honestly, that only matters if I am playing a difficult passage and for writing a slow clarinet passage or something, smaller keys would be fine for me. But the standard sized ones are my preference. If you want to eventually learn to seriously play the piano (not just use the instrument as a means to get a composition into a computer), I would strongly advise getting standard sized keys.
Finally, I think that we are all operating under the assumption that you want to use a midi keyboard acting as a controller - that is, to interface with a computer where your sounds live (though for years I used midi keyboards before computer interfaces were really a thing). If I am correct in that assumption, then you don't really need presets on your midi keyboard controller. I use none. In your computer, your DAW will have mechanisms for you to save your presets so you don't have to have this function in your keyboard (when it functions as a controller). When it functions as a synthesizer or sampler (in other words it not only uses the midi data generated by your playing, but uses that midi data to trigger sounds that are made within your keyboard), well then you would need presets.
Incidentally, those pads on those controllers that
@PaulieDC and
@sostenuto mentioned are a lot of fun. Some of them are nicely responsive and can be great for putting down a beat. But you can also do that finger drumming on a keyboard. In fact, even after using my son's Ableton Push pads (which were a lot of fun with all the mesmerizing lights), it was just easier for me to use the keyboard. And for that, I'd definitely NOT want to use weighted keys....just sayin'
So hopefully the explanation to the answer "it depends what you want to do" came with some clarity.
Good luck!
