Jon Siegel / ジョン 米岡

Ever since I my Korg nanoKey got fried by a rogue USB hub, I’ve been lamenting over the loss of having a cheap and fun keyboard to play around with after work. This afternoon I was browsing a Japanese shopping website and checking out the specs of Korg’s microKontrol, but just couldn’t justify the paying that price for something I’d just mess around with for fun. It just so happens that around the corner from my office is an odd little DJ shop with a funky owner who’s always calling my partner and I over to check out new gear. I decided to have a look around his shop this evening and maybe have a glance at the microKontrol if he had one in stock(no intention to buy, just to look!). He raced over and asked, “You want one of these? I have a special now, only one left!” A minute later he walked back with an open box and said it was a display model at the Korg showroom, but it was in a glass case, so it’s never been touch. Not only was it discounted, it was half price. After working my ass off this month, I figured I earned myself a shiny new keyboard.

It is beautiful, this thing. There’s a whole bunch of control knobs for interfacing with Ableton Live or Logic, a drum pad, and of course a velocity sensitive keyboard. It’s very sturdy, runs on USB, AC, or batteries, and has tons of pretty lights and LCD displays. The tough part, even though I could download a PDF of the manual in English, it doesn’t help me any more than the Japanese manual did. I got all the dials set up and the keyboard is great, just trying to figure out how to map sounds to the drum pads. Guess I can’t expect to figure it all out in one night. Will post some tunes soon once I get it figured out.