Korg - nanoKEY Studio MIDI Controller - Black

Product Information

The nanoKey Studio includes 25 of the same velocity-sensitive, backlit keys as its predecessors, which is a love/hate thing, depending on your needs. Because I have to look it up, and because it's so annoying to use two hands to get to the scale I want, I rarely use it. Introducing the Nanokey Studio: an exceptionally portable MIDI keyboard and studio companion that establishes wireless connections with your laptop or tablet.

Easy Scale maps your chosen scale and key to the ‘white’ notes on the keyboard (which are actually black). The history of iPad is enough long just to have opportunity to edit mappings of our small devices with iOS, or iPadOS.

The Studio provides a keyboard, knobs, trigger pads, and touch pad that lets you instantly convert your inspiration into sound. It is much bigger and heavier than an iPad and for longer off-grid sessions you definitely need a hub with PD and a power bank. Well, to be correct, you can hook up to a Mac or PC and set different channels for the eight scenes, but that isn't ideal.

Even when you assign stuff to the pads their core functions remain when holding down shift and tapping the pads. That’s when I fired up Korg’s Kontrol Editor software, where everything I needed was clearly laid out and easy to find (see Figure 1). Eight highly-sensitive performance pads enable you to play drum grooves as well as piano chords and will convey all the subtle nuances of your performance. My iOS testing for the NanoKontrol Studio was predominantly in Korg’s own Gadget app; mainly because this was the only app I could find that supports it out of the box.There’s no Logic plug-in this time, and again no Live remote script, so any knob assignments will need to be manually mapped. The keys themselves are the same as on the regular Nano: large buttons that feel like keys on traditional ‘clacky’ computer keyboards. It’s easy to connect to an iPad/iPhone music app such as KORG Gadget or Apple GarageBand, or to someoner Mac/Windows music production software. But it needs a powerbank to be portable - and how do I connect the iPad if the USB port is used for power? From there, I tailored the pad sensitivities to my liking, then saved that customization into one of the eight performance scenes.