KC4 : Korg NanoPad2 plus the KAOSSPAD

[wpostma]

A nice combination of korg midi controller hardware with Korg Collection 4 is the KAOS PAD audio effect which simulates the physical KAOSS pad, although it’s more of a “cousin of the kaoss pad” than a virtual kaoss pad, I wish they called it KaosTouch or something instead of KaossPad because it would emphasize that while it’s an audio performance effect, it’s very different than the kaoss pad. And it’s purely an audio effect, it’s not really an instrument, or an audio generator. Not a problem though as you can now combine this with any other instrument in the Korg collection, and I find it really fun to combine it with sequencer patches from triton, and triton extreme, as well as wavestation patches.

It seems that it’s a good idea to use Korg’s midi controller configuration application (KORG KONTROL EDITOR) to set up a non default set of X,Y, and Pad press Midi CCs. It does not seem the Nanopad actually has continous pressure sensitivity, it really just has an ON and OFF (127=on, 0=off) midi CC, but those THREE midi CCs (one for X, one for Y and one for touch) are essential for making it possible to really use this as a performance instrument. I guess if you have a touchscreen or you like using your laptop trackpad to interact with the plugin GUI window, that’s fine, but it’s really not ideal.

Anyways, once you get this working, it’s fun. It’s NOT fun getting this working.

1. IN REASON, when used as a DAW they don’t transmit any MIDI CCs into the instrument unless you configure text files.

2. In bitwig, you have to use the DAW’s remote control midi learn functionality as bitwig seems to block MIDI CCs from going into audio effects, unless you code custom bitwig controller scripts to support it. Using the midi learn feature is tricky as you have to learn the press midi CC, then without moving your finger leave the nanopad touchpad pressed but do not move in the X (left right) or Y (up down) direction at all, then precisely execute a tiny vertical move when learning Y and a tiny horizontal move while learning X. The reason for making the move tiny is so that you don’t also make a 1% move on the Y while trying to have it send the X midi CC. Tricky. And Bitwig doesn’t let you just type the MIDI CCs into it.

3. In CUBASE, it was actually easy to get it working. At least after googling. You have to add an empty midi track which will not have any events recorded or played back to it, but which needs to be record armed, and which needs to have its midi output set from the track property inspector area, to go to the VST AUdio effect that you added to your audio or instrument track.

There may be a DAW that really does this right and lets you just right click on a plugin and route any midi controller you want to just that plugin.

Anyways, my only complaint about the KAOSS PAD VST is that it’s incredibly CPU heavy, and so you probably want to use it in a small project and capture your performance, render the track out and continue. It may even be a BUG in the current initial 1.0 version of the plugin that it’s convolver/reverb algorithm can consume almost all of a Core-i7 11700 CPU core all by itself.

Some patches use more CPU than others, it seems the reverb effects with feedback (granular wash sounds) can really choke a fairly good system.

Who else has tried the kaoss pad vst and what did you think?