Korg Releases KAOSS PAD V
First off, I don’t plan to do a whole lot of “gear news” on my site, but every once in awhile a new product intrigues me enough to talk about it. Korg just announced a new Kaoss Pad V, which looks to be a successor to the KP3. I used to have a KP3 and it was a very fun, albeit limited effect. I always enjoyed the looping and some of the XY effects were pretty neat. Over the years Korg have introduced a few sequels to KP3, all with questionable features and formats, so it’s interesting to see them revisit the same design again.
This thing looks amazing, I love the white with full RGD grid matrix. I do think they should have replaced the seven-segment display with an oled, that seems like it would have been a no-brainer. The RGB grid looks amazing, always dreamed of that, though maybe some color effects as you play the pad would be nice.
Whats new? Well first and foremost this version is dual touch, basically giving you two XY pads in one. Unfortunately, looking at the program list, only about half of the included presets make use of the dual touch. In my opinion, especially at this price range, every preset should make use of this feature.
The other big change is that you can now build your own presets, on the KP3 you only had access to the included effects presets, I think it was 128 or so. This version lets you stack up to five different effects per preset and even has an LFO you can map to various parameters. Amazingly, you can somehow do this all on the KPV, they use the RGB grip as a sort of touch screen interface, with small rows of grid cells acting as sliders and even as a sort of spreadsheet style mod matrix.
I’ll be honest, it doesn’t look fun to program from the device its self, but still, the fact that you can seems incredible, and I could really see myself digging into this system for a completely different workflow.
I can’t speak to the quality of the new effects, or variety, it seems like they’ve added a few other goodies, like a sample slice arranger to shuffle the slices within a loop. They’ve also added an auto gate for the XY pad that simulates rhythmically tapping the screen. And finally the four sample pads can be used to bypass the effects within a preset.
Loopop has a great video covering all the new features that goes into depth about programming presets.
This seems like a really cool update to a really cool product, I’d absolutely love to play with one of these and use it in my setup, but I have some hang ups. KPV seems to still be targeted towards DJs with the RCA ins and outs, I don’t want to go back to owning two pairs of 1/4” to RCA cables. I mentioned the seven-segment display already. I kinda wish the grid was 16/16, just to make it a touch more modern while still keeping that grid vibe (a full on touch display would kill the vibe imo). And finally, the price, wow this thing is quite pricey, Zzounds has it listed for pre-order at $650. Still, it seems like a cool product that I could see myself having a lot of fun with, which is why I’m covering it here.
If you do end up deciding to pick up the Kaoss Pad V and want to support me, consider using my Zzounds affiliate link: https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979412/item--KORKAOSSPADKPV