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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

@hikari *totally sincerely* WANT

@hikari I wonder if Kickstarter would go for this