Korg nanoPAD 2 black Reviews

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2 years ago

Cute and easy to use!

3 years ago

Nice, compact and subtle device!

For a novelty music practitioner, it is a novelty instrument...

4 years ago

Simple but effective

I bought this product to pair with a keyboard that had no pitch bend or mod wheel. This xy pad does the job. It’s smooth, light, small, and easy to carry. This should last me until I get the keyboard I really want. Oh, and the pads don’t hurt to have either.

6 years ago

Does what it promises

For the price, it is excellent. If playing fairly fast drums on it is your thing, you may have some issues with it skipping triggers (not due to the controller side of things, but rather the pads themselves). However it is highly unlikely that it will be a problem in the bigger scheme of things unless you really want to mimic George Kollias using just your fingers and this controller.

6 years ago

It's decent... I do recommend it.

I use these for finger drumming and MIDI input outside the studio. Personally I have owned two of them. Turns out they are not extremely robust. That's acceptable.

I put some decent effort into finger drumming, and I'll be honest, the pads are fine. The velocity response is good and quite useable. The haptic on them is better than expected for this budget. The sensitivity and feel does vary from pad to pad slightly. I think you won't even notice this unless you already invested enough time and attention into learning finger drumming.

The XY pad is a fun bonus and very useable for automations and instrument control. I use it to simulate opening the hihat with my custom programs.

By 2020 standards, the reprogramming software to rearrange the pad MIDI assignment is crude, but functional.

7 years ago

Bargain

If you have desk space then you can never have enough pads around to hit whenever your session is taking unexpected turns.

Technically I don't need it anymore but always have it plugged in and near at hand to use the X-Y pad, arp, different scales etc. I don't have any others in the range but this one is a very useful device, always used.

8 years ago

For the price and size what else...

Does everything well, well built, great pads and full o features

The x/y pad is fantastic and also the built In arpeggiator is everything you could ask for.

Recomend it if you what a good drum pad full o features

11 years ago

Excellent pads

I bought these to quickly drum in some loops as well as for to perform with in a couple of weeks.

They're your standard MIDI pads and mapped to the exact correct drums in Ableton out-of-the-box. The feeling of the pads is really good, although they are a bit small and thus I find myself hitting the edges of the pads instead of the centres, resulting in much weaker hits. The pads are pressure sensitive so you can play dynamically, silently or loudly. You can also play melodies or e.g. pads but of course it's a bit confusing when you don't know which notes are white keys and which are black keys.

It has some cool features like the touchpad you can use for arpeggiating the drums, although it's mainly a joke feature. The arpeggiating is within the pads and isn't synced to MIDI so the arpeggiated patterns aren't synced to the tempo of the song you're playing and you can't change the arpeggiation tempo anyway as far as I know.

I am a bit worried about the sturdiness. It's good to lay the pads flat on the table. I feel like if they're uneven, the whole thing bends when you hit the middle pads.

But for the price, they're really good pads. I bought the more expensive padkontrol from Korg before and did not like it because it was cumbersome and did not map to good drum settings out-of-the-box, I actually like these more even though it's a cheaper product.

11 years ago

Samples or drums in a small, small pad

I really like this little thing. I don't use it as much as I intended to, but when I do it works very well. The pads/triggers feel solid and have good response, the control surface is good as well, and the banks function enables versatile usage scenarios.

I mainly tend to use it for triggering drum samples and beats, although it has many other uses and could probably be a big help for DJs or sample players in live situations - it might even be used as a proper instrument if one configures their software meticulously, which I have not yet done.

Still I am happy that I bought this and it sits nicely next to my nanoKEY and nanoKONTROL, and some day I might even expand my collection.

12 years ago

Decent little controller.

Great little controller, my only issue is I want one of those sucker holder (you know the ones that hold your smartphone) so that I can use it live on the synth. Cool option to have to make live performances slick.

12 years ago

Cheap pad for fooling around.

I didn't expect much from this, I bought it just to play around while doing electronic music. The pads don't respond well, but the grey square area works fine. There's not much else I can say about it since I don't have any "proper" use for it, but if you know what you are doing, I'd imagine it will work well for triggering samples or stuff like that.

12 years ago

Excellent bargain!

I bought it for drum track programming in my DAW. Unfortunately shortly afterwards I got an electronic drum kit so I don't use it for that task anymore. It is good for triggering loops in Matrix View in Sonar or for controlling various switches in my DAW, eg. playback control or track switching.

It would be nice to have additional midi out port for use with other MIDI hardware without need for a computer on.

I really like bundled software. AAS electric pianos and acoustic guitars are high quality software instruments and each of them sells separately for €99 each. That makes every controller in nano series a real bargain!

12 years ago

Nice machine!

Nice little machine! Lovely to tap drum rythms into your favorite midi/drums software. Easy to use, easy to customise. Included software (voucher for download) is very good.

12 years ago

Very portable but no more useful..

than using your standard MIDI keyboard. I was hoping that I would get more groove by tapping, but I found the velocity too soft for my liking. I even adjusted the settings using Korg Kontrol pad (which was only very basic), but I still wasn't satisfied. I went straight back to my keyboard in the middle of the job.

Image Korg nanoPAD 2 black

Technical Data

  • Manufactured by Korg
  • Released in 2011
  • Average price : $61
  • Dimensions (Wmm x Hmm x D): 325mm x 16mm x 83mm
  • Weight : 285g
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