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ok getting myself a little battery-powered keyboard with 33 mini keys that i can just play whenever wherever is clearly my greatest ever purchasing decision so far as getting into music and spending more time doing it goes. i can hardly put this thing down…
the specific one i have is a Yamaha CBX-K1XG which suits my 1990's General MIDI synth obsession, but it is a dated and hard to get piece of kit. if you want something similar that you can get today, i have heard very good things about the Yamaha PSS-A50! i almost bought one
both of these have four important attributes:
• smol, 33 mini-keys only. can fit anywhere: your lap, your desk, your bed, your bag
• battery powered! enhances portability and removes friction
• various timbres! not just a piano
• also a MIDI controller! endless possibilities
some big differences though: the PSS-A50 is one of the absolute cheapest keyboards Yamaha currently sells, so it has no stereo, no sustain pedal input, no mod or pitch bend wheel :'(
the CBX-K1XG is a much more powerful thing in most respects. sadly it has no modern equivalent
if you want a less limited modern keyboard, the Yamaha Reface series are also nice fun little keyboards and have stereo and a sustain pedal input, but they differ in the kind of sound selection you get. e.g. the Reface CP offers only electric piano sounds (but they're real good)
are there any other modern keyboards like this? these days it seems like small keyboards are mostly toys without MIDI, or pure MIDI controllers with no built-in sounds, and i'd hesitate to recommend either…
oh yeah, one thing you get with the PSS-A50 is a recording feature. so you can like record a bass part ahead of time with one instrument, and then play chords and a melody with two hands on top while playing it back. this kind of feature is especially unusual for smol keyboards
@hikari it's always been weird to me because the cheap rompler keyboards of the 80s always seemed to have at some level this capability due to the demo song, but it wasn't exposed to the user in any way
@mcc oh it's totally a deliberate market segmentation thing :/
@mcc my CBX-K1XG lacks recording or accompaniment for a fairly defensible reason: it's more of a MIDI controller and MIDI module integrated into one unit, and fully featured for both — you can even send sysex messages with it byte-by-byte lmao. its immediate ancestor was the CBX-K1 which is a pure controller, no sound generation capability
@mcc and its other relative of note is the CBX-K1B. the B stands for an extremely important feature: it's made of transparent blue plastic
@hikari This is lovely.
@hikari Incidentalyl: I really dislike the ubiquitous pitchbend wheels with the divot, and much prefer the "pitch spike" like on the Minilogue and Reface CS
@mcc . o O ( pitch trackpoint )
@hikari *totally sincerely* WANT
@hikari I wonder if Kickstarter would go for this
@hikari most keyboards in that price range these days only have USB for MIDI. So, you can plug them into a computer, but maybe not directly into old MIDI gear. Casio makes a bunch of cheap keyboards, some are even well-regarded for the money (the CT-S200 and CT-S300 have good reviews). The SA series is the smallest/cheapest, and it also has USB MIDI. Alesis Harmony also fits the bill. My fave tiny keyboard is the Roland JD-Xi, but it's expensive and no speakers.
@hikari it's a shame none of the tiny cheap ones actually sound very good. They certainly could sound good, the tech has advanced remarkably since the 80s. Korg basically puts a Raspberry Pi in all their mid-range synths these days (Modwave, Opsix, etc.), and it has enough power to do pretty much anything. There's no technical reason an engine like that couldn't be strapped into a $150 portable with speakers, except maybe they don't want to compete with their own mid-level keyboards.
@swelljoe yeah indeed, the ROMpler tech of the 90's has undergone three decades of minituarisation and they could make a fantastic little unit if they wanted to, but they don't
@hikari now, I kinda want to hack together a tiny keyboard that has speakers with MiniDexed (https://github.com/probonopd/MiniDexed) to turn it into a tiny mega-DX7. FM is not the best for drums, but great fun for just about everything else I'd want. Like I need another project...
@swelljoe oh, there are SA series keyboards with USB MIDI? can you give an example?
@hikari I thought they all did, but now I see that was a mistaken belief based on trusting Amazon's specs. Amazon says they have it, but the Casio site says they only have power and headphone I/O...I think Casio knows better. And, in the answers section at Amazon, it's clear it doesn't have USB. Oops. Another fail. No reason they couldn't include USB MIDI...it costs like fifteen cents.
@hikari the Alesis Harmony 32 does have it, though, so at $49 it's maybe the cheapest (USB) MIDI keyboard with sounds and speakers from a reputable manufacturer.
@swelljoe oh neat!
@swelljoe yeah it's a market segmentation decision clearly. fun fact: all three of the modern Yamaha PSS series have the hardware capability to do MIDI, but only the PSS-A50 actually comes with USB MIDI; there's people out there who've modded in MIDI ports to the ones with no official MIDI support