Korg Kaoss Pad 3

Ever since the first Kaoss Pad, I knew I wanted one, and the KP3 is the best one yet, in aesthetics and features.  I picked this up for a very good price in Tokyo last year, and it’s been in heavy use since. 

Build Quality
Quite simply superb.  The metal chasis looks great and feels like it could withstand residency in a nightclub or rigorous touring.  The rubber pads feel solid enough to hit rhythmically, but the slider feels a little weak. 

Sound Quality
The sound quality on the KP3 is hit and miss.  For basic FX like delays and filters, the KP3 sounds great, and the Granular and Distortion FX are definitely useful.  But admittedly alot of the more advanced FX are pretty weak.  The reverb is pretty horrible, and the vocoder is downright unusable. 
One of the FX paramaters is a Synth with one pad-axis for pitch and the other axis for a low-pass filter.  This synth sounds surprisingly good, and the white-noise generator is hugely useful for cymbol crash-type wooshes. 
All FX are in the form of presets, which are essentially untweakable apart from via the pad itself.  This can get a bit frustrating when you’re used to being able to delve into paramaters. 
In terms of sheer sound quality, the KP3 can be fairly easily out-shone by many plugins. 

Features
The KP3 is not only an FX unit, but also a very useful MIDI Controller.  By holding down the Shift-key and hitting Pad 8, you enter “Ext.Mode”, wherein the FX are bypassed and the pad turns into 8 vertical sliders, with all buttons sending CC messages via the MIDI Out or USB connection. 
Another feature of course is the ability to trigger Samples via the 4 sample trigger pads at the front of the unit.  If you’ve got an SD Card, load up your samples onto the card from your computer, and assign them to the 4 pads.  Downloading the latest OS is a must here, as you can assign different triggering methods to the 3 pads.

I make use of all these features live, and use my KP3 as a MIDI Controller, vocal FX unit and Sampler. 

Check out this clip, which was made with the Graintable FX on the KP3:

Incidentally, the vase in-frame is by Zaha Hadid, and of course the mic is a Sure SM58. 

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