Small MIDI controllers

I have been jamming with grooveboxes and synths for years now. I have been doing the DAW-less jams. I’m one of those people sometimes. Sometimes I use Ableton, which is a sane thing to do. I’m not a purist.

Most of my synths are desktop modules without a keyboard. I somehow gravitated toward that kind of setup early on and mostly favored the non-keyboard version of pretty much everything I own. That being the case I’m always in the market for keyboard controllers to play my gear.

The best thing to ever hit the market in the mini-keyboard market is the Arturia Keystep. There’s no denying that this is the best feeling mini-keyboard (with freaking aftertouch too!) around. It’s really playable and the sequencer/arpeggiator features are really great. I have two of them.

However, there are some annoying things and of course I’m always on a quest for something even smaller than small. That quest led me first to the Midiplus X2 controllers. These things are great too, just less featured. I dig the fact that it has a full-size USB port on it instead of the annoying micro USB that the Keystep has. At this point gear has got to either have USB-C or a full-size USB B port. Anything else is just annoying.

Let’s keep going on the journey. A lot of things are moving to Bluetooth now, and none of the aforementioned are Bluetooth devices. I started wondering if there was something out there that was super small (I have a few cheapo tiny controllers with annoying USB mini ports that I can never find a cable for anymore) and had both Bluetooth and a wired MIDI output.

Turns out that M-Vave makes one called the SMK-25. This keyboard is tiny. Almost as tiny as the cheapo little spongy key devices that I’ve tried in the past. It also has an internal li-ion battery pack. I was pretty impressed and since I already had one of the M-Vave Chocolate foot controllers I thought I’d give it a try.

I was able to pair using Bluetooth and easily set up the wired MIDI output using the same Cubesuite app that the Chocolate pedal uses on iOS.

Biggest thing for me is the keys actually feel great, almost as good as the keys on the Keystep. This is attributed to the fact that the keys are individually sprung instead of molded together as one piece with live-hinge style springs. That style is always spongy.