RepTIDE

With some extra xmas money I picked up a Korg nanoKey.  It is a 25-key USB midi keyboard that is small enough to throw into your laptop bag.  There is also a Korg nanoPad and a Korg nanoKONTROL.  All 3 are seen in the linked image below.

I chose the black version since at the time it was cheaper and I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to work with linux.  I had no reason to believe it wouldn’t but I had a hard time verifying it on the web.  I also happen to like black.

When I first plugged it in I couldn’t get it to do anything.  I should note that was NOT the fault of the nanoKey.  I am just inept…or I was.  After searching around on the internet I managed to find some tutorials for getting JACK set up along with a HOWTO for connecting Seq24, Hydrogen, and JACK together.  Once I followed both of those tutorials I was up and walking.

Why was I walking?  I quickly learned that although I could get sounds to trigger with the nanoKey the latency was horrible.  I am sure a lot of that had to do with my unfamiliarity with JACK.  I was grasping at straws trying to get the settings right.  Eventually I got it to the point where it would work fairly well but there was still a lot of latency and pops.  While I could have kept messing with it and trying to find the sweet spot I opted for a more drastic approach, a whole new OS!

I made a new partition on my HD and installed Ubuntu Studio.  Ubuntu Studio is a specialized version of Ubuntu made especially for sound and video.  Besides having all the sound editing software you could ever want the most important aspect was the realtime kernel.  That alone made all the difference.  Once booted into Ubuntu Studio my latency was gone.  The pops were gone.

So up to this point, with only a few days under my belt with the Korg nanoKey I would have to say it is incredibly fun.  The keys (as many other reviewers have mentioned) take a little getting used to.  They are more like laptop keys than piano keys.  It especially throws you off since it looks like a piano.  There are octave up and down keys for moving around the keyboard.  Buttons to bent the pitch up and down are also there.  Once I get the hang of it I plan on picking up the nanoPad and nanoKONTROL.

Unfortnately now my only excuse for not becoming the next Brian Eno is my lack of ability with the software and the difficulty transferring the sounds in my head into sounds from my speakers.

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