For several years now I’ve been playing around with electronic music. I guess I actually started with music about 12 years ago with the guitar. I’m not very good on guitar. I practice a bit, and I can play the basic chords pretty well, but I’ve not taken any lessons to really improve my playing, or put the time in.

So a couple of years ago I discovered Korg’s Kaoss Pad products, which are sythesizers and effects controllers operated by touch pad. After watching some instructional and demo videos on youtube, I got them and tried it out. It’s really fun. I don’t claim to be good at writing songs, in fact I don’t write them, I just improvise. I don’t care. It’s all about fun.

The effects controller of the setup is the Korg KP3 (the red one) — the third version of the Kaoss Pad. While it has a few built-in sounds (drums and synths), mostly what is does is take sound input from another source (another instrument, a microphone, or even an iPod) and allow you to manipulate and play with the sound with a wide variety of effects, such as delay, reverb, looping, flanger, modulation, and combinations of all of the above.  It also allows you to create sample loops — up to four of them — which are held in the machine’s memory and can be activated at any time. So the KP3 is a fun and easy device to use for live performance or recording.

OK — so I hope Korg is listening. They came out with a new version last year called the KP3+, on which they made a few programming changes to the device and added a few new effects. So it isn’t so much a “new version” as a slightly improved version of the old version. It seems like a lot of people are not upgrading — not enough benefit. I am one of those people. Can’t spend another $300+ dollars or whatever on a devices that is only a tiny fraction better than what I already have. They also came out with a handheld version of the Kaoss Pad, which is kind of cool, but much more limited and just not something very useful to me.

So Korg — here is a list of things I’d like to see on an fully updated/redesigned Kaoss Pad.

1. I liked the little screen on the new mini Kaoss Pad (the Kaoss Pad 2) which allows you to easily read the names of the programs. A small screen like this would be a great addition to the KP3, as it is not easy to read the giant letters that scroll across the touch screen.
2. More Loop Banks: Love the loop banks. Need more of them. The solution now is to chain another KP3 to the first one. Why not give a new version 8 loop banks — same size buttons as they work really well.
3. Option for creating longer loops that are not constrained by the beats/timing of the machine: Kind of like a looping pedal for a guitar. Sometimes you want to be able to create a loop that is longer than the time available.
4. The ability to apply an effect to one loop only, even if all the loops are playing, or to no loops and only apply the effect to the input current running in the Kaoss Pad.
5. Any other cool stuff you geniuses can think of.

OK Korg-Friends — get on it! Thanks for your time.

First experiment using Bleep Labs Nebulophone. Running it into the KP3 to make loops, add effects, and otherwise diddle with the sounds.

No structure. No theme. Just sounds. 6 minutes. Maybe listen to it while you’re chopping some wood or something.

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