Keith McMillen K-Board USB Keyboard

This K-Board is slim, and solid. They say you can drive a car over it.. I won't, I enjoy using it too much. I have it connected to my second iPad and it works with just about every music app I have.

If you look on YouTube for this product, you'll see the Keith McMillen crew in a truck of about 6 guys run over this thing.... thump thump! Then they plug it in and IT STILL WORKS! Not that I'd recommend doing that but it just goes to show you how durable these little backpack keyboards are. --- I got my 1st one used & it worked great. Then I wanted a 2nd one so I could have a 4 octave desktop keyboard & that idea worked too! They pretty much can fit right next to each other. --- The K-board has more features than I use. I just keep the velocity on all the time & that's it. They make a more expensive one but I don't need all the extras. A laptop, some good music software & this thing will let you write music anywhere! --- I also have the Quneo controller which got beer spilled on it & thrown out a 2nd story window & it still work... in the YouTube video that is. --- The only problem I encountered with this was the new 2nd one, a key was sticking. Returned it & got a good replacement. Guess it needed to be run over by a truck first, to be 'broken in' (pun intended!)

Attractive simple design, and admittedly rugged. But quite difficult to press keys down, I was reduced to playing one note at a time in order to have any accuracy at all.

I've always had a soft spot for portable midi controllers, as I frequently have song ideas while out and about. I've tried several portable controllers from several companies, and I guarantee you that this is the absolute best of the best. I haven't been this excited about new gear in years. Professionals: Two things to add to the awesome build quality, intuitive features, and the rest: This is fully class-compliant, and it also RECEIVES messages. That means you can do things like change a latched arp on-the-fly without interrupting the pattern. I've NEVER seen another controller that does that - not even full-sized.

The keyboard construction feels great; the pads feel nice, the controller has a rubber matted feel, its simply built great. The functions worked well right out of the box, I have a 15in macbook pro retina using it with ableton live 9 and it worked perfectly; just plugged and played. As I was playing with it I noticed I could only go down a couple octaves and up a couple octaves. I scrambled for an answer and then found it on the website; it CAN ONLY go down 2 octaves and up 3 octaves. I contacted the companies support and they told me its probably for playing purposes. (fast replies by the way) I don't really play the keys so I cant really understand if this really helps playing it better but what I really don't get is why there is not an option to go up and down ALL the octaves, it really does not make sense, hopefully they will change the firmware as they go along. I use it to trigger samples in ableton and I literally can have 100+ samples needed to be triggered whenever I need to, not being able to control all of them makes the controller only partially usable for me. Until they fix the octave issue I cant recommend it for sample based control

My son plays melodic percussion at school, and I thought this would be a great way to allow him to practice quietly at home. Using the Garageband sampler/recorder, I recorded samples of various melodic percussion instruments (glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, celesta, etc.) from my Casio keyboard/synth. So, now he can play any of these virtual instruments with his K-board through Garageband, with his headphones plugged-in. He loves it. His music teacher was impressed with this implementation. The pads are a bit small when compared with a glockenspiel, but practicing on this will sharpen up that accuracy. We were also messing with these for drum sounds. It took me a minute to remember that kick and snare are toward the lowest end of the keyboard, so we had to decrease the octave a time or two to get to the kick and snare midi notes. Otherwise, no issues whatsoever. Great deal on a great piece of equipment. I throw the K-board with iPad connector kit, USB cable, and iPad mini in a small laptop sleeve, and he's good to go!