A couple years back I wrote up a little review of the Korg Kaossilator. More recently I caught myself thinking about this little piece of gear and the Korg Mini-KP that I’ve since added on to go with it and I thought I’d provide a retrospective on the purchase.

First, let me say up front that I haven’t regretted the purchase at all. It’s a fun piece of kit that I’ve enjoyed goofing around with quite a bit. However, I never did really get around to getting it really integrated into my setup. It has remained more of a sound toy than a real instrument than I use.

I’m not really surprised; it basically is a sound toy at the end of the day. It certainly could be used for various leads, basses or other parts but every time I consider doing that I decide not to bother. Why? Massive.

I picked up Native Instruments Komplete 5 last year primarily for Reaktor, Kontakt and Battery but I’ve used Massive more than all three of those combined. And if you want to buy Massive by itself? $200, maybe less if you find a good deal. That’s a bit more than what Kaossilators are going for on eBay but who cares? It costs an addtional 60 bucks but does a hundred thousand times more than what the Kaossilator does and is much easier to integrate into any DAW that supports VSTs. (And if you’re not using a DAW that supports VSTs you might consider an affordable upgrade.)

Over all the little physical devices with their touch pads and clicky knobs are a lot of fun for goofing around or making music collaboratively with some friends. But as a serious tool? More and more I keep shying away from my physical synths and turning toward software solutions which provide just-as-good or better quality, vastly improved workflow and better cost effectiveness. Controllers are a different story though, and have become an indispensable part of my setup. More on that later.

As I mentioned about a week ago I ordered a Korg Kaossilator from some kind soul in Japan who took pity on the rest of the world which doesn’t have it available for retail and sold some on his eBay store. Even better, he didn’t really gouge, so I ended up only paying $20 more than I would have had I waited till late January or February. $20 is a small price to pay to get to play with it now.

So yesterday after work I stopped by the post office and picked it up (since, you know, they will of course only come to my house while I’m not there). I popped it open (slightly disappointed that it didn’t include a DC adapter as I’d hoped) chunked in 4 AA batteries I had laying around and jacked in the phones. Immediately I was able to start playing some funky little melodies on the durable, rubberized touch pad. I was struck by how nice this little guy really is. From a build quality standpoint I was reasonably impressed. The buttons and knob feel nice, the plastic doesn’t feel cheap, and I already mentioned the touch pad being pretty tough. On the audio side of things I was also pleased with the sound quality. It sounded pretty nice over the phones and when I hooked it up to the KP3 over the line outs and to my main monitoring system I was blown away with how good it actually sounded. Some of the sounds are very “Atari” (which can be very good) but many of the sounds are quite expressive and nice. Sure it doesn’t give you any real control over the sounds themselves (other than the y-axis, which serves to give you some control over a given parameter like drive, cutoff, or whatever) but the included sounds are quite nice. One patch in particular stunned me with a nice bass drop it did. My BX10s shook the house.

But above all I really like how the device is designed from a user experience standpoint. It’s very simple, but the amount of functionality that it provides is pretty impressive. The LCD display is simple, but functional. It displays your current patch and the beat (a flashing blip in the lower right) or the current parameter for whatever button you’re currently holding down. The central knob gives you control over the patch/parameter. The top button is tap tempo and BPM. On the lower left is scale (chromatic, Ionian, Dorian, 4ths, etc.) and lower right gives you control over the loop (overdub, play, stop, erase). If you press the top and lower left buttons at the same time you can change the key you’re in (three octaves, from C2 to B4, I think), while top plus lower right will give you some control over the loop length. It’s not particularly long, 8 beats at most, but it’s enough. Hidden on the edge of the device on the lower left corner is the arp/gate control which enables the gating. If you hold it down you can pick from 50 different gate patterns, so plenty of flexibility there.

The touch pad of course is the main action and how you actually “play” the device. The x-axis plays the various notes on the currently selected scale, in the currently selected key. For example if you have it on chromatic in C then as you drag your finger across the pad from left to right you will start playing C and move up half-steps. Pretty standard. There are a lot of different scale types (31 in fact), so you get all the Western ones you would expect but lots of good Arabic and East Asian scales as well. As I mentioned already the y-axis gives you some control over the sound that’s playing itself. It’s like an emphasis generally, but it’s probably expressed through several different types of parameters that can be controlled.

I’ll be honest, you don’t really need to be a musician to goof around with this thing and make some stuff that sounds fun. I think that’s the point though. Still, having some musical background might let you actually produce some truly musical results; either way it’s fun.

When this comes out in the US I think I could easily recommend it to anyone who wants a TENORI-ON but cant afford the steep price tag, or simply can’t get their hands on one yet. I’m not saying the Kaossilator is really direct competition for the TENORI-ON; it’s a phenomenal device that clearly does a lot more than the Kaossilator. But lets face it, the Kaossilator costs more than SIX times less, and that’s at retail prices (which you can’t even buy since they’re only selling it in the UK right now). So, from a value standpoint, the Kaossilator is the clear winner. Especially if, you know, you have a KP3 and Ableton Live 7 and an EMX-1 to use it with. *cough*

Overall it’s a great little device that I look forward to adding in to my setup. Routings are getting to be tricky though. My workflow (which used to be very streamlined with Ableton Live + hardware controller) has jumped up a couple notches in the complexity. That’ll take some getting used to. All of that is for another post though.