Korg Kaoss Pad Mini review
a few years ago, i had a kp2 and i didn’t get on with it very well. it had a lot of novelty value, what with all the flashing lights and the motion record function, but it just started gathering dust in my studio, so i gave it to a friend.
about a month ago, i saw the KP mini in a music shop, and gave it a prod. i was impressed. korg have stripped out all the daftness (sampler, motion record, cutting switch, flashy lights) and put in the same effects engine as the rather over-priced KP3. And it’s a good FX engine. Lots of standard effects, filters, phasers, reverbs, delays etc. The filters are quite transparent, not terribly warm, but they are very clean sounding, and the 72dB/oct LPF is particularly ballsy. the fuzz distortion is good – it’s not the best digital distortion ever, but start working the pad with your fingers, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what it can do.
The second half of the 100 possible FXs is where the little red and black box begins to really shine. of course, there are 10 god-awful “synth” patches, which are a waste of space. korg have, however, been very generous with the other 40 tho. very funky, comb-filtery delays, a great tape and dub echo. there’s a series of grain shifters – which basically give you a hardware buffer override. and the lopps! oh the lopps! i loooove the looper patches in this thing! i may have got better at tapping the bpm button, but i suspect korg have improved the technology since the kp2. the looper patches are wa-wa-wikkedy-wa-wa-wicked. they fixed the irritating memory problem of the kp2, which would erase the sample buffer as you dragged your finger to the left, and now anything can be subjected to that stutter-to-granular-and-back-again goodness.
the real killer about the box is its size. about 2 and a half inches square, it’ll fit in the pocket of your khaki kombat pantaloons, and IT RUNS ON BATTERIES! you can even fit a neck strap to it for flavor flav freshness.
my only gripe with this thing so far is that some of the effects tend to leave a bit of audio in the buffer which comes out as noise, but at a very low level.
and for the same price as a kp3 you could get 2 of these suckers and several beef jerky and pastrami sanwiches. bonza bonsai!
