Remember when electronic sound gear hid in hulking, rack-sized cases? Korg’s Kaossilator series had already begun shrinking the desktop KAOSS Pad gear, but even the first-generation Kaossilator wouldn’t fit in your pocket, given its square shape and corners. (Well, unless you were wearing overalls.) The Kaossilator 2 and Mini Kaoss Pad 2, on the other hand, are scaled perfectly to your hand and would tuck neatly into a pocket in your pants or bag. And while I know some readers were hoping for a new Pro addition to the KAOSS line, these little bundles of joy have added some functionality that could make them musically useful. Being dedicated hardware, they also won’t suffer from a battery sapped by phone calls or the interruption of a Facebook message – and that input jack is built in.

We saw the new models at the NAMM show this month. The highlights:

The Kaossilator 2 is a PCM-based phrase synth, inspired by the original Kaosillator, for improvising melodic lines. What’s new is some handy recording functionality:

• Scale Key and Note Range so every note is “right,” effectively, as on the original
• Drum sounds
• Gate Arpeggiator with adjustable gate time and swing settings
• Loop recording to layer phrases and add as many overdubs as you like
• “Dual Loop Recording banks allow DJ-Style mutes and cross-fades”
• Record using the built-in mic; or use the mic input for recording of external input
• microSD/SDHC, so you can cheaply add up to 32G of removable storage

That crossfader, of course, is entirely new, and Korg does mention “dance music” in the sounds and focus. It’s easy, then, to imagine this as a pocket-able instrument for jamming or something you’d use to make musical ideas on the go, and it does look like a lot of fun.

The Mini Kaoss Pad 2 is an effects box to the Kaossilator 2′s synth – and it even has a built-in MP3 player, so you can load up sounds and tracks ahead of time:

• MP3 player with microSD card slot for data storage/exchange – or record performances and mixes
• 100 effect programs, with 3 favorite slots
• Looper, Vinyl Break, and Ducking Comp from the Kaoss Pad Quad (actually, need to find out if all the slicer effects from the Quad are there)
• Internal mic plus external audio inputs
• I’ll quote them directly on this: “Support for pitch change and cue point settings allows serious DJ play.”

Now, it’s a little hard to imagine DJing on something the size of a deck of cards, but, of course, I hope somewhere out there tries. I like the idea of putting your tracks on there and improvising a little mix, especially with the ability to record. Again, you could use it as a little sketchpad.

I got some hands-on time on the first morning of the show, and they’re a blast to play with, certainly. See the official Korg videos.

The other advantage of dedicated hardware here is, again, having a dedicated resistive touch interface. On a phone, the highly-sensitive capacitive interface can lead to missed triggers, and you have to fiddle around with menus and the like. There is something to be said for this dedicated gadget, at least for some. And it seems worth comparing, since many of you have a smartphone. What do you think – are you intrigued at all by these latest Korg gadgets?

With a US$160 street, if you are, they may be hard to resist. We’ll watch for when these start shipping.

http://www.korg.com/kaossilator2

http://www.korg.com/minikaosspad2

Previews of each, then the two together:

I think I’m going to have to start teasing random projects I’m doing, like taking a picture of the corner of a dirty dish before I do the dishes, or showing a corner of my shoe before I tie them in the morning. But here’s one more teaser for you, especially since Americans today have the day off.

One reader tips us off to an image inserted in iKaossilator. It sure looks like a new KAOSS product. Aaron lazytrap writes some reasonable speculation:

New KP, red & yellow = Kaossilator+KP in one h/w box? New `tribe (play/stop buttons)? Hrmn.

I’m just hoping KORG will get some MIDI connections and MIDI sync back on their products, cough – we’ll see if this continues the trend of leaving that out.

Thoughts?

Ready to just use the gear you’ve already got and quit it with the teasers, already? (Hey, after NAMM week, I get to sit down and make music again myself, hopefully.)

There’s a special love among certain Ableton Live users for the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3, Korg’s lovely and capable sampling/effects box. Al, aka DJ Chinkial (see his trippy MySpace page) has a free VST for free as a holiday gift to us all (Windows-only). The basic idea: make a beatbox plug-in for your computer, using the KP3 as outboard controller, complete with visual feedback. (If you don’t have a KP3, you can use any controller, minus the blinkie lights – monome hack, anyone?)

The results are very wonderful: the KP3 becomes a synth drum machine. The only problem: some bugs may yet need to be ironed out, as the plug-in eats some CPU resources and this is a first version.

I don’t have a KP3 to try out that aspect myself, so if you grab it, let us know how it goes. (Your mileage may vary.)

Al writes us:

the info u posted is on one of my first attempts at a vst version of my reaktor beatbox live machine

kaoss64 is a 16 step 64 part sequencer
that triggers the slices of two bar
loops like a sort of rex file player for wavs

oh and if you’d like to try it out
it would work with any old midi controller just wont have the visual interaction

x position is cc10
y position is cc24
pad trig is cc25 but thats just used for visuals

the abcd buttons are the lowest register keys on a keyboard

cheers again and have a good christmas and new year al.

Description

Direct download link Link not working; exceeded bandwidth

Updated: CDM is now hosting the file as kaoss 64.rar

PLEASE don’t link directly to the file without linking to this post! Thanks!

More from MySpace:

kaoss box 1 vst plugin for kaoss pad 3

my vst beatbox for the kp3

pretty much finished this version
4 part synth record
4 part external control mode
for synth parameters
every synth part has 8 faders each
controling lfo adsr vibrato phase mod and somthing else by selecting the
a b c d buttons
in xy pad mode the a b c d buttons
set which synth part gets recorded
pitch for pt 1 2 3 pt 4 is the octave
the drums are 8 part sample players
select a part using the fx depth knob
in external mode
then the 8 buttons trigger the steps
in pad mode
the fx release slider is the shuffle
in extr mode its used for loop size
the hold button

But that raises another question. As it happens, CDM community member FauxAudio was just asking about hosting music files on our forums:

online audio host – reccomendations?

So far, in the running:

• Amazon S3 (and as I noted, Yahoo just opened up their player tool)
• musicane.com (also sells albums)
• payloadz.com (ditto)
• Twango, which also hosts video and still images but supports an embeddable audio player (thank you, Nokia)

Interestingly, Amazon S3 seems to be the current favorite.

What would you want from a music host? I guess that’s the first question. Other experiences / preferences?

Data center photo: skreuzer, via Flickr.