Mixing with a mouse wears thin somewhere around the third automation pass. Korg's nanoKONTROL2 puts eight faders, eight knobs and a grid of buttons under your hands over one USB lead, in a shell slim enough to sit in front of a laptop. This is the white version.
Eight channels under your fingers
Each strip carries a knob, a fader and three switches, mapped by default to pan, level and the solo, mute and record arm trio. Writing automation across several tracks stops being a run of separate mouse passes. Nearby sits a marker button for dropping cues at the points in a song you keep returning to.
Drive a soft synth instead
Nothing ties the controls to a mixer window. Point the faders at an envelope generator and you can shape attack, decay, sustain and release by feel, leaving cutoff and resonance to the rotaries above them. A sweep captured by hand tends to sit differently in a track than a curve drawn afterwards with a pointer.
One cable does everything
Power and MIDI data both travel down the USB connection, so there is no adapter to misplace and no spare wall socket to hunt for. Setup amounts to plugging in and letting the computer find the device. Pack it flat in a laptop sleeve and your control surface travels with you.
iPad use, with the fine print
Through Apple's Camera Connection Kit the unit runs from a tablet with no external supply, which brings Core MIDI apps such as Korg iMS-20 within reach. Korg does not guarantee that this arrangement survives every iOS update or new model, so treat it as a working option rather than a promise. Long sessions, or two nanoSERIES2 devices at once, are safer on a powered hub.
Remap it with Kontrol Editor
Korg gives away the Kontrol Editor on its website, and it reaches the settings the panel itself does not expose. Any control can be assigned a different message, and the minimum and maximum values it transmits can be narrowed, which helps when a plugin parameter only uses part of the range. Settings save to the unit.
Why white
Pale hardware reads more like furniture than backline gear, which some players prefer next to a light coloured laptop on an open desk. Function is identical to the black model. Choose on looks alone.
