gliderproarc

Oh yeah. I had one of these. I loved mine. Was so sad to see they didn’t keep the idea going. When I saw the scribble strips on these leaked boards, I immediately thought of the Kontrol49. It’s probably wise to be leery of Korg after what happened with this board. I’m just so happy to see them… (not release… leak?) rumored to be making a polyAT controller in the vein of the Kontrol 49.

Long time lurker and infrequent poster, but I’m really interested in these new Korg boards and have been watching this thread hoping to see news about release dates. But the discussion about polyAT has got me thinking, so I decided to post some of my thoughts. I love polyAT. As a Roli seaboard user, I’ve been using mostly the aftertouch and left to right pitch bending. Don’t use the forward to back modulation hardly at all, and even release velocity is hard to use when so few instruments allow you to assign it to anything. And while the pitch bending is cool, I’m actually really happy with glide and wheels/sticks for pitch control on regular midi controllers. My Roli is starting to die on me, and I am dreading the hassle of trying to get one shipped internationally (they don’t ship to where I live) and with the recent financial troubles the company has had, I was hoping to find some alternative to getting another seaboard. Osmose looks great but out of my price range. And then I saw the NI boards and these Korg boards get leaked. And I realized, I’d be okay with less expression if I get to keep polyAT. I find I use polyAT mostly for filter cutoff modulation on synth pads. I tried to use it for synth brass stuff, and use the aftertouch to do swells and such, but its response was always a bit too sluggish, so I end up using an expression pedal instead. But for synth pad stuff, it can get pretty boring holding out a simple chord for a long time. Some patches will have interesting movement programmed into them (think “evolving”) but it’s much more fun when pressing into a key introduces some of that change and you get to control that evolution instead of letting an LFO have all the fun. I also like using polyAT for brining out notes in a chord. When a synth pad is used to drone out root, or a fifth, it’s really fun to “draw out” notes from a held chord by just leaning into them. I can even get away with playing pretty dense chords that would be muddy if all the voices were the same, but by just opening the filter on a note or two inside the chord I find I can get away with it. So while I agree it’s not useful for a lot of things, it’s really fun for a lot of synth stuff, and having polyAT in these Korg boards is probably enough to make me jump ship and not get another Roli. Having an internal audio interface is perfect for my setup since my rig is laptop based. 73 or 76 keys would be SO nice, but I get that 73 is not that popular. I’ve made do with 61.

Sorry to resurrect a thread after it drifted off the first page of the forum. But I saw the thread title and wanted to share a bit about a mechanical keyboard I purchased recently. I play music on the weekends and fly a desk at work. I was getting some pain in my wrists after banging away at my laptop"s little keys and decided a mechanical keyboard might help a bit. I never had any pain in my wrists even after long hours of scales and exercises at the piano l, so I was concerned about pain in my hand when typing. I was tempted at first to get a 'ergonomic keyboard'. I"m sure they are great but I ended up going with something a little smaller. I live in Japan and I was surprised to learn one of the high end mechanical keyboard switch makers (Topre) is a Japanese company. Fujitsu makes a little 65% board that I got used for a good deal. It"s called a Happy hacking keyboard (HHKB). It"s not too incredible compared to other boards, but I did notice I have less pain in my hands these days, but not for the reasons I expected. Having a nice keyboard got me to start practice my touch typing more, and I think typing properly is one of the biggest contributing factors. I didn"t notice how many bad habits I had formed till I started to get serious about typing on this thing. Kind in same way a nice keyboard might not make you okay better, but gets you to practice more, this board has been really nice. It also has a Unix layout. Meaning the caps key is replaced with a control key. I use keyboard short cuts for more things as a result and I think reaching for the mouse less is helping with my wrist pain. Having a keyboard with more travel also has me bottoming out my keypresses less. Banging on the keys less has made for less stress on my hands too and all on all I have to say I am very happy with it.

A Neko/Meko with OSX. Or a laptop designed for stage use; more durable, matted black finish, at least two HDs one for system/apps and one for sample streaming. I would also prefer USB controller keyboards to become less smart. I don't want to pay for fancy software integration with pro tools if I don't use protools. Most soft ware I use live, particularly mainstage, are very good about making intuitive use of simple MIDI controllers. I just want good action, 9 faders for organ drawbar control, a few knobs, buttons to send MIDI program changes for patch recall, some sort of XY controller, wheels not joystick, ribbon would be nice too. Built in audio interface would be awesome too.