Korg nanoPAD 2 black

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.

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!