KORG nanoKEY Studio for mobile producers
Creating music ‘in-the-box’ is something many music producers do these days and KORG know this, hence their uber portable little controller, the nanoKEY Studio.
The KORG nanoKEY Studio is tiny.
Tiny as in hardly any bigger than a tablet. But that’s the actual point of nanoKEY Studio; to offer some hands on control for users of iPads to create music – or laptops of course but there seems to be a real thrust toward the use of iPads.
What nanoKEY Studio does
nanoKEY Studio is essentially an all-in-one mini midi controller. It has a keyboard, a touch pad, trigger pads and knobs to give you hands-on control of the music app you’re working in.
An added bonus is that the keys and knobs are all backlit to and when in ARP mode the LEDs animate the arpeggiator movements.
The X-Y pad allows one to map parameters for performance tweaking and there’s even after-touch too.
The keys on the nanoKEY Studio are surprisingly usable even if they don’t immediately look like it. The two octaves are very playable and the keys are actually quite chunky for such a small unit.
The pads are very useful too. For starters they can be used to as a control panel to quickly access certain functions and then secondly they can be uses a percussive pads for programming drum parts on the fly. In chord mode you can also trigger multiple chords based on the scale you’re in.
The pads can also be used to access up to 8 different scenes which are stored on the nanoKEY Studio and the unit comes with an editor which you can download from the KORG website.
Software
The nanoKEY Studio comes with a host of bundled software both for iPad/iPhone and for Mac/Windows.
Includes are the following;
iPad/iPhone
- KORG Gadget Le (music production studio DAW app)
- KORG Module Le (piano/keyboard sound module app)
MAC/Windows
- KORG Legacy Collection – M1 Le (synthesizer sound module)
- UVI Digital Synsations (synthesizer sound module)
- AAS Ultra Analog Session (synthesizer sound module)
- AAS Strum Acoustic Session (acoustic guitar sound module)
- AAS Lounge Lizard Session (electric piano sound module)
- Propellerhead Reason Limited (DAW music production software)
- Ableton Live $50 discount coupon (DAW music production software)
