10 Stupidly Fun Toys Every Musician Needs

8. Kaoss Pad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw_YRiLT_dM The Korg Kaoss Pad has been around for a while now and it has to be one of the most brilliant musical gadgets you could ever hope to own. Essentially, it is a touchscreen interface than can act as an inline effects processor, or it can be used as a MIDI controller for live sampling and instrument control. It's the daddy, basically. Plug it into a laptop and you can use it to control most anything you want via MIDI. It can be used to trigger samples from the laptop, play software instruments or run MIDI parameters such as pitch bends in real time. It can also be hooked up to trigger other MIDI devices such as stage effects or lighting as well as changing patches on MIDI connected guitar amps (like the AxeFX or POD Pro) and even pedals. As a midi controller, it's one of the cleverest out there, especially considering you can map parameters to sections of the screen and even map to gestures. So for instance, tapping in the top right hand corner of the screen could trigger the next amp patch from an AxeFX while a long swipe across the bottom half of the screen could trigger a lighting sweep - it's just that clever. Putting it into the middle of your signal chain and using it as an effects unit yields the most fun from the device though; you can put anything through it, from keyboards, to guitars and even vocals. The built-in effects are outstanding and having the ability to manipulate sounds in real time rather than using static pedals and presets is a revelation.