Forget the Korg NanoKey, Turn Your iPhone into a MIDI Controller!
This is likely old news to many of you, but it’s such a worthwhile tool, that I want to be sure everybody’s in the loop on it. I’ve been wanting a small MIDI controller to take to work, on planes, in the car on long drives (in the passenger seat of course…) for some time now. I had considered the Korg NanoKey, but hated the idea of always having that one more thing to carry in the laptop bag.
My wife has an iPhone 3G and a little virtual piano application on it. When I saw her pull that application up my thought process was basically, “Wow, I should code a little keyboard controller for the iPhone that would sync with my laptop for laying down quick ideas while out and about.” Then I figured somebody else already thought of that and sure enough, Silicon Studios has, developing the iPhone Apps in the iTouchMidi Lab.
In addition to a standard keyboard controller with octave shift and pitch bend, they have matrix triggers, XY pad controller, a “tilt” controller using the phone’s accelerometer, and a basic mixer. A lot of these have very practical uses. I can imagine the mixer becoming your new frontier tranzport, etc.
Check out the company here.
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2 Responses to “Forget the Korg NanoKey, Turn Your iPhone into a MIDI Controller!”
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I think this is a cool idea, but i dont know how musical i could get on it… i feel like i want the feel of buttons and knobs when working on music… but of course, people say that about text messaging too :)
Hey Brandon, good to see you ’round these parts. Thanks for the post!
There’s definitely some truth in that. I think it has it’s niche though. It will never be a primary controller, but that’s not really its purpose. The keys on the Korg NanoKey feel more or less like laptop keyboard keys, so no matter the mobile solution, great feeling and touch isn’t going to be part of it. For $6 bones (if you have an iPhone already), it’s a lot cheaper than the NanoKey, and less baggage too.