MicroKorg XL

Up until my RC-50 Loop Station purchase, the most I've ever spent on a musical instrument was $50. Snagged my bass in Santa Barbara for a cool $50. Plundered my M-Audio Radium 49 MIDI controller from a pawn shop for $50 and made two albums worth of jingley-jangley beats with it. Somehow amps and software just seem to float my way as well, which accounts for my generally ghetto-rigged situation.

Seeing as how I could use an upgrade from the Casio CT-655 that has been rockin' it as my main live synth, the one keyboard that really caught my eye is the MicroKorg. It's light, portable, has all kinds of sweet knobs and settings to mess with, a sick-as-hell looking interface, and is generally a cool customizable synthesizer. Only downfall, small keys.

Which led me to look into the MicroKorg XL, and led me to this enjoyable video:



I've run across this jetdaisuke dude a few times from different products I've been interested in (such as the Kaossilator), but this is the only one I've seen with the annotated subtitles, which confirms my suspicion that the dude is truly hilarious.

Possibly my favorite feature of both the Micro and XL models: the vocoder. Also my favorite part of the video, jetdaisuke's comment that vocoder is "shameful in public."

On a recent trip to Guitar Center I had the chance to try out all three of my researched prospective keyboards, the MicroKorg, MicroKorg XL, and Korg R3. All three were super neato, the small keys on the Micro are a factor, but not an enormous factor, and I'm still completely undecided on whether or not any of them will be in my immediate future.