Recently I learned a truth that I long suspected: The Korg Nano series of USB controllers are crap. Mostly, anyway. I used all three for a few shows, and occasionally plugged them in to do tracking work (most DAWs that aren’t called Ableton are notoriously bad with controller mapping though), all in all pretty light use. But the only one still chugging is the nanoKontrol. The nanoKey was obviously junk from the start: the keys aren’t really keys, they’re just buttons arranged like a 2-octave keyboard, and they fall off at the first bump. The nanoPad was the most disappointing though. I never really got the X-Y control to map right, which is a real shame because it’s a Kaoss Pad style control for any parameters and frankly that’s an awesome idea. And a couple weeks ago when I started mapping for live shows in Apple MainStage, I realized that the triggers were off in some way, and hitting one pad triggered at least three others. Lame, because the construction seemed more solid and the action of the pads is great. Sloppy triggers on the pad and broken “keys” on the keyboard renders the whole shebang pretty much pointless.
So I picked up this little Akai guy for next to nothing (just under what two of the Nanos would cost you) and it really does the trick when I put it alongside the only working nano. The nanoKontrol covers track volume, mute, playback/loop triggering, and effects sends. The Akai controls synths and drums, with the knobs running a few parameters like filter cutoff, envelope controls, delay speed, and that sort of thing. It’s nice to not have to put a full size keyboard on my stand, and keys are actually really nice — think small Casio for the size and action. The knobs are very short, making the thing low-profile overall but they’re sort of hard to grip until you get used to it. The action on the pads is nice. They require a little harder hit than the nanoPad did, but they’re reliable and consistent, plus they light up when you hit them… fancy. As a bonus, the MPK Mini has an arpeggiator on it with quite a few options, and though I haven’t figured out how to get it to sync with the project tempo, it has a tap that works well and it’s a really nice little trick for throwing some of that Front 242 or Depeche Mode kind of sound in there (ha). There’s an auto map software that comes with it, but since I’ve only used it with MainStage, I haven’t needed it.
Here’s the Mini sitting with the rest. It’s small enough I can set it off to the side using the top tier of the 3-tiered stand. I created a little representation of it in MainStage and it’s now one of the cornerstones of the Sharks live set. If you’re looking for something in this vein, you could really do worse, and it would even suffice as a decent studio desktop controller as well if you don’t need a full set of keys.
