1. Built very solidly, though it understandably makes a certain amount of noise when you whack the hell out of it. The casing is metal, which surprised me initially but I imagine is necessary to withstand the whacking.

2. The included samples are crisp and the presets layer multiple sounds nicely to give some tonal variation depending on how roughly you go at it. If you’re habitually playing with your hands rather than sticks the default sensitivity will need dialing down a bit; as is, some of the patches require that you belt the hell out of them to get the “loud” version of a snare sample assigned to the rim, for example. I particularly liked some of the synthesized sounds using the Wavedrum’s models, which have a nice organic-but-unfamiliar character, though.

3. The included delay and reverb are welcome, and I suppose could be helpful playing live to give things a dab of presence. Their deployment in the presets can be gimmicky in places.

4. Korg really should have included either USB, MIDI or the option of an external editor (as with the previous Wavedrum). A quick scan of the editable parameters in the manual suggests that extensively tweaking them on a three-digit LED is going to be a chore on a par with brushing your teeth via your anus. I suspect the main issue is going to be that the limited knobs and buttons will control different things depending on patch and model, requiring that you have the manual around to refer to. This could well be profoundly annoying. (I stand to be corrected on this point, however, having not tackled it yet.)

5. On the upside, you can edit quite a large amount of stuff, and there are several algorithms that treat the sound from the internal pickup, plus a dual-oscillator analogue synth model and so forth.

6. The presets in places remind me of why I grew so frustrated with digital synths in the 80s and 90s; there is an overabundance in places of words like “jungle,” “midnight” and “alien,” which signal the whooshings, rumblings and watery noises that you might expect.

Overall, though, buy it if you have any pretensions at all toward being a percussionist, which I’m assuming all keyboard players do. It is a decent piece of kit that will reward technique and experimentation and is an instrument with its own character, and as such a rarity these days.

Current reading list:

Queen of Candesce, by Karl Schroeder The Neddiad, by Daniel Pinkwater Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter Gofun-go no Sekai, by Ryu Murakami 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

More music soon, I hope, when things stop getting in the way.

I think Propellerheads protest far too much about the usability problems with most DAWs. In fact, the interface for Record looks like a lot more clutter than I’m used to in Logic, as others have noted already. I used Reason for quite a while and liked it, but I did find its interface inflexible in some ways, notably its vertical tallness; with wider screens becoming the norm I often found myself wanting a double-width rack instead of just the single column. Record looks like a step backward in terms of clutter. For one thing, if its mixing desk is always that size it would drive me batshit. I barely use Logic’s mixer; I find myself tweaking levels, panning and effects by track rather than messing with multiple tracks at once.

The timestretching is useful, yes, but the comping feature (for putting together vocal takes etc.) doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the way that Logic does it.

And what this bullshit is about it not being a DAW, I have no idea. I can see the distinction they’re trying to make, but it amounts to little more than spin in the real world. It comes across as an attempt to avoid disadvantageous comparisons with competing products.

None of which goes to say that I wouldn’t give it and Reason a go again; in fact, I’d been dithering about upgrading to Reason 4 recently anyway, the ability to use effects like the Scream on audio, and the modular tricks you can do in Reason using Combinators and chained effects would also be interesting.

But the closed nature of the system turns me off somewhat. Having to run three applications (Record, Reason and Logic) just to use an AU plugin on one channel strikes me as utterly absurd. And I think by delaying the addition of audio recording to Reason for so long they may have talked themselves into over-egging it when they did add it.

I’ll gloss over the radio silence around these parts recently, if you don’t mind, since “normal service now resumes” posts are, for the most part, tedious. Suffice it to say that I’ve had a slightly difficult couple of weeks.

As for progress, I have one new song 99.5% written (I literally need to fix the tune for the last line) and am battling an unduly complex arrangement and trying to get the vocal right because the tune is, I now realise, incredibly hard to sing. This one’s called “Last trains,” alluded to previously.

I also have a polite little ditty called “Baby steps” that is written—I think—but may need the key bumping up a notch from the demo and a bit of arrangement work. This one, finally, is the “use all the old analogue gear” approach that I originally started out with; it’s mostly played on a Roland RS-09, SH-101, x0xb0x and MFB 503. I was listening to The Smiths again recently and thinking on the fact that some of their songs were better for not overextending a simple idea, so “Baby steps” is essentially two verses, a chorus and an outro. The “I think” above is because I can’t hear the outro in my head yet, and I want to have an idea before I start noodling away.

From next week things should assume a more level course, so the pace at which I’m able to finish and upload stuff should pick up rapidly. As will, no doubt, the twittering and tumbling and audiobooing. Bear with me.