Korg nanoPAD 2 black

I use these for finger drumming and MIDI input outside the studio. Personally I have owned two of them. Turns out they are not extremely robust. That's acceptable.

I put some decent effort into finger drumming, and I'll be honest, the pads are fine. The velocity response is good and quite useable. The haptic on them is better than expected for this budget. The sensitivity and feel does vary from pad to pad slightly. I think you won't even notice this unless you already invested enough time and attention into learning finger drumming.

The XY pad is a fun bonus and very useable for automations and instrument control. I use it to simulate opening the hihat with my custom programs.

By 2020 standards, the reprogramming software to rearrange the pad MIDI assignment is crude, but functional.

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 really like this little thing. I don't use it as much as I intended to, but when I do it works very well. The pads/triggers feel solid and have good response, the control surface is good as well, and the banks function enables versatile usage scenarios.

I mainly tend to use it for triggering drum samples and beats, although it has many other uses and could probably be a big help for DJs or sample players in live situations - it might even be used as a proper instrument if one configures their software meticulously, which I have not yet done.

Still I am happy that I bought this and it sits nicely next to my nanoKEY and nanoKONTROL, and some day I might even expand my collection.