joep_klijs's Reviews

Ideal musical sketchpad to get inspired!

It´s pretty old, but I purchased one for cheap (€50) recently as an impulse buy and I am extremely happy that I did. A lot of the reviews that I read for this product just don´t do it justice and could cause readers to miss out on a seriously great creative tool.

This is a pocket synthesizer with looper and audio input; more like swiss army knife for creating synth and bass lines, laying down basic ideas for tracks etc. It takes a while getting used to using the touchpad rather than a traditional keyboard, but once you do, the results are extremely rewarding. This brings me back to some of the common negative comments that I heard about this device:

• no undo button => is there an undo button on a piano or a synth or any instrument that you play live? For me it´s the most natural thing in the world to practice a specific phrase until I can play it perfectly in time with different phrasings etc. If you do that, an undo button is not really that relevant. Plus, you can record any basic phrase idea on the second track, audit it, delete it and redo as long as you like. Then only when you are 100% happy, integrate or export the loop as an audio file and start using it.

• touchpad is difficult to play=> with the touchpad it is slightly more tricky to hit specific notes, but by no means impossible. I have pretty big hands, but I find that if I roll, rather than move my index finger, I can hit adjacent notes precisely and with ease, making it very much possible to record musically interesting phrases played live. But.......you need to realize that this is not a master keyboard with graded hammer action. If you want great keyboard action, get a proper master keyboard, not a pocket synth. I´m saying this, because in this context Korg have included three principal features that will allow you use the touchpad in a very different and musical way:

• the gate arpeggiator

• the possibility to assign many different types of scales to the touchpad

• the possibility to change the length of the scale on the touchpad

These features are there for a reason and once you start using them properly you can let rip even quite virtuoso solo lines, and most basslines and comping patterns become a piece of cake.

I make music with people who are quite opinionated about hardware, and in the beginning when I showed the Kaossilator to them, the were like ¨does not look serious enough¨ or ¨nice, but I don´t know if it´s for me¨ Yesterday when we were mixing down some tracks, I decided to take this thing to play some solo lines and suddenly all skepticism had disappeared.

In short: this device is great fun, very practical, and if you play it like intended will allow you to create any kind of line phrase or beat that you want, even in a semi-professional context. If you can get one for about €50, don´t hesitate! (even if it´s the ¨plain¨ version without the sampling feature)