Back in the gray days of 1999, Korg’s KP1 Kaoss Pad brought touch-pad control to the effects processor, turning a “set it and forget it” device into a performance instrument. The KP2, and especially the KP3, piled on features such as a metal housing, a vocoder, synthesizer voices, resampling, MIDI, and USB. Then Korg went back to basics with the miniKP, a pocket-size, touchpad effects processor that’s a ton of fun.

You can think of the Kaoss Pad Quad ($350 MSRP) as four miniKPs in a box for the price of two. It adds a few upscale KP features like the large trackpad, dramatic illumination, and mic input. Most interestingly, it brings all the effects to the surface so you can combine them in hundreds of ways. Let’s plug in.

Around the Quad

At 7.3 x 8.4 x 1.7 inches, the Kaoss Pad Quad is slightly smaller than the KP3. Its black plastic case makes it significantly lighter as well (1.7 lbs), though it feels sturdy enough for enthusiastic playing. The 20 preset effects are grouped into four sets of five: Loopers, Distortion / Compressor / Flanger / Phaser, Filter / Pitch, and Delay / Reverb (see Fig. 1). You can enable one effect per group by pressing the corresponding button, which turns on a red backlight. The touchpad then alters two parameters per effect, based on the vertical and horizontal position of your finger.

Fig. 1: LEDs in the touchpad’s corners pulse in ever-changing colors in response to incoming audio. Every button lights up, too. The 20 big buttons at top activate up to four effects at a time, one effect per bank.

With four groups of five effects (plus bypass), you get 6x6x6x6 combinations, which equals 1,296. (Because one combination would have all four effects bypassed, Korg specifies 1,295.) The effects are connected serially, left to right. Cleverly, Korg configured the reverb and delay group to fade out naturally when you turn off a button or lower the FX Depth knob.

Below each effect group is a Freeze button that locks in the last values you played on the touchpad. That’s surprisingly powerful: When a group is frozen, touchpad movements continue to affect the illuminated effects in other groups. So, for example, you could loop a bar of incoming audio by hitting Freeze on the Looper effect (bank 1), and then vary the distortion and lowpass filter (banks 2 and 3) by stirring the pad with your finger.

Even better, when a Freeze button is lit, you can switch among effects within its group seamlessly. I locked in a dotted-eighth delay by tapping the touchpad at the center and hitting Freeze on the Delay effect. Then I switched between two other delay effects without missing a beat. I could even turn the delay off and keep it ready at that setting, because the Freeze button was still on.

Knobs and Jacks and BPM

The FX Depth knob offers another level of control. It’s conveniently positioned at the bottom left, allowing you to fade multiple effects in and out. Turn it quickly and you can gate effects rhythmically. Above the FX Depth knob, there’s an Input Volume knob with a tricolor peak LED. Because the Kaoss Pad Quad has no knob for the line outputs, I used this to create fadeouts at the end of songs.

To the right is the detented tempo knob (20–300 BPM, with tenths in the range below 100) and a tap-tempo button. More on this in a moment.

Fig. 2: Despite the new case, the Kaoss Pad Quad still uses RCA jacks rather than 1/4-inchers. However, you can use both the mic and line inputs simultaneously, unlike on older Kaoss Pads. The Direct/Send switch controls whether the Kaoss Pad Quad outputs a mix of input and effects or just effects (as you’d want when connecting it to a mixer).

Around the back, you’ll find a 1/4-inch mono mic jack with trim pot, stereo RCA I/O, and a 1/4-inch stereo headphone jack with volume knob (see Fig. 2). Completing the scene is a switch for selecting direct or effects-send mode, a jack for the compact wall-wart power adapter, and a power button. You have to hold down the button for a few seconds to turn off the power.

Holding the Tap Tempo button for three seconds activates Auto BPM mode, which attempts to set the Kaoss Pad Quad’s internal tempo by analyzing the incoming audio. (The looper and delay effects sync to the beat.) Usually Auto BPM would grab the right tempo within just two or three beats, but sometimes it would be way off. And once it found the tempo, it refused to update when the incoming audio changed tempo by more than a BPM. (Pausing four seconds or so got it to listen again.)

Click the above image to watch a video overview of the Korg Kaoss Quad effects.

However, in practice, this stubbornness wasn’t a problem, because the Tap Tempo button remains active in Auto BPM mode. When you hear your bandmates change tempo, just punch the Tap Tempo button a few times, and the Kaoss Pad Quad averages your hits to set its new center value. It’s a good combination of human and machine listening. I’ve heard several grumbles that there’s no MIDI sync (or MIDI at all), but tap-tempo worked well enough. I only wish the button’s flashing backlight were brighter.

How About Those Effects?

Although the effects are the star of the show in the Kaoss Pad Quad, the brief manual offers only 1- or 2-sentence descriptions of each, along with a table showing how their parameters map to the touchpad. To get more depth and a sense of which of the 1,295 combinations work best, search out the videos on YouTube and Korg’s site. Here are some discoveries I made.

• Looper. This effect starts recording when you tap the touchpad, capturing one measure of incoming audio. As you slide your finger upward, the looped portion gets shorter by half until it’s a buzzy 128th note. The x-axis does nothing, which lets you play with that parameter on other effects. I really liked using the Looper to create fills.

Reverse Looper. Like the Looper, this captures and loops up to one bar of audio, but it does that retroactively, recording what arrived before you hit the touchpad. It then loops the whole bar or ever-shorter segments backwards. This is also good for fills.

• Loop Slicer. This cool effect grabs the previous bar of audio and then loops different sections of it depending on the position of your finger. The y-axis controls the duration of the loop (from one bar to one 128th note) and the x-axis controls which portion of the recording loops. There are up to eight slices. So if you sang “ABCDEFGH” on eighth notes, you could loop any letter, two adjacent letters (CDCDCD), the first or last four, or all eight. I also used this effect to find smoother loop points in sustained sounds.
• Grain Shifter. One of the more chaotic effects, this seems to grab portions of a loop and loop them, extending the beats with granular time-stretching for a rhythmic stuttering effect. I noticed it collapsed the incoming audio to mono.
• Vinyl Break. Sliding your finger up and down does sound like scratching a turntable, but without quite the detail. Holding a point on the touchpad creates a credible record-slowing-down-and-stopping effect, with the x-axis controlling how long that takes. I found quick swipes, especially with a feedback delay, produced some useful sound bursts, and holding the extreme left edge of the pad for four beats created a catchy muting effect.
• Distortion. On this effect, the axes control distortion tone and amount. At low values, it’s good for adding body. I also liked tapping higher values on the beat to emphasize drum hits.
• Decimator. Here the axes control sample rate and bit depth. By itself, this is an ugly effect, but I loved drumming on the touchpad with the Jet effect and a delay downstream to create unique percussion.
• Ducking Compressor. This effect aims to recreate the pumping sound of French house music, in which a kick drum triggers a compressor to reduce the level of a background track so it swells into the backbeat. Here, it adds a queasy lurch I didn’t use much.
• Flanger and Phaser. These two effects offer lots of variation and richness as you slide or tap the touchpad—a great showcase for what makes the Kaoss Pads so expressive.
• Filters. Lowpass, highpass, and bandpass buttons are on offer here, with the axes controlling frequency and resonance. The filters didn’t get as resonant as I’d like. I also wish Korg had combined them into a multimode filter to make space for some of the more unusual filters from the KP series.
• Jet. This excellent effect is a flanger in which your finger is the LFO, controlling delay time and feedback. Like the other flanger and phaser, it offers lots of rich variation.
• Pitch Shifter. Another mono effect, this one sounds pretty rough. The x-axis gives you an octave of chromatic steps, and the y-axis controls the mix between direct and pitch-shifted sound. I found it most useful for vocal effects and tapping in variations on drum hits.
• Delays. For most effects in this group, the y-axis controls depth and the x-axis controls time, with the position selecting subdivisions such as half note, quarter note, dotted eighth, and so on. “1 Delay” adds a single echo, which is good for filling out the sound without cluttering the mix. “Delay” adds basic feedback echoes. “Delay Reverb” follows that with a metallic reverb. The distinctive “Tape Echo” (my favorite) adds distortion and panning to the echoes. And finally, there’s a straight reverb, which again sounds metallic and fluttery. On the positive side, all the delays are the interpolating type, which creates cool pitch shifts as you change the timing.

The Kaoss Pad Quad is compact, yet so clearly laid out it’s easy to play. Markings around the touchpad would have made it easier to pick out specific values, like notes on the pitch-shifter and rhythmic divisions on the delays.

Four Effects, No Waiting

The Kaoss Pad Quad is a fun, hands-on device that, again, blurs the line between instrument and effects processor. It’s brilliantly direct: Just turn it on and start shaping your sound.

Is it worth $350, considering that the full-featured KP3 (at $460 MSRP) sells for a little over $100 more? Missing from the Kaoss Pad Quad are some of the signature effects from the KP series, like vocal filters, ring modulators, and infinite LFOs. Nonetheless, the ability to combine four basic effects in ever-shifting ways does offer a lot of potential, as does the ability to use the line and mic inputs simultaneously.

Bottom line: If you’re looking to add instant drama to your sound and don’t want to deal with menus, modes, or MIDI mumbo-jumbo, the Kaoss Pad Quad is well worth a tap and tickle.

Pros: Hands-on control of multiple effects via a large, smooth trackpad and glitch-free buttons. Easy to learn. Eye-catching lights. Mic and line inputs are active simultaneously.

Cons: Average effect quality. Limited variety. Maximum loop time is one bar. Doesn’t follow tempo changes in Auto mode.

David Battino (batmosphere.com) co-wrote The Art of Digital Music — now available in Kindle format. His studio has more touchpads than keyboards.