Rated 
Puts the fun back into electronic music
Fun
Software
Posted Sep 13, 2007 - I am an amateur when it comes to music, but find it fun to tinker. Using a keyboard is fine, but it does limit the control you have over the sound you are producing. This device allows you a finer degree of volume control, and lets you slide up and down the octaves more smoothly, at the cost of not being able to play chords. This is a good quality instrument, more portable than most midi equipment, and feeling pretty natural to play (I've been practicing with it for almost a month). It has two modes of use - either as a standalone instrument, outputting audio from it's built in synthesizer, or as a midi controller, letting you control an external synth instead. Unfortunately, these two modes work slightly differently - when you're using it as a midi controller, it does not produce any sound if you just pick it up and blow: it only produces output when you change your fingering on the keys. The standalone mode works more naturally, however. The standalone mode sounds good, but not great. It comes with a number of different instruments loaded, and you are meant to be able to add, edit, and remove these using an external program (over a midi connection) - I haven't yet been able to get that to work, as the software is pretty clunky (on MacOS, anyway). The midi connection seems to need a dedicated computer port - no sharing of USB connections with a midi connector, for example - or else your synth tends to get confused, I imagine because the continual varying of the sound requires heavier midi traffic than a keyboard. To summarize, I found this a lot more fun than using a keyboard - it is much easier to just pick up and run through a few exercises, or just toot the thing randomly and see what happens.
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