Nanokontrol Studio Bluetooth/USB MIDI Control Surface with 8 Faders & Backlit Switches

I don't write reviews very often, but I thought I'd write a review on this unit to help those considering this purchase. First of all, there are more powerful and complete control surfaces for DAW software, which is what I'm using to unit for. These more complete units are in the $600-$1000 range, so you should expect more from them. The Korg unit does not have motorized faders, and it doesn't control bus volumes. What it does is give you tactile control over eight channels that are bank switchable, all basic channel and transport controls and a very nice jog wheel. I am using it with Sonar Platinum, and the set up was very easy with presets for Sonar and other DAW software. This unit is replacing a Tascam FW-1082, which I liked very much. The Korg nanoKontrol Studio is much simpler, and if you look at it as a supplement to the mouse/keyboard interface, well worth the money.

I hope musicians read this article before buying this device. This device is not supported on Big Sur. Nobody who's writting reviews know this because it's was not on the korg site till recently. They are working on updates even for Monterey version so it's going to take some patience before we can use it. Wait and check the site before buying. The device itself works ok. You can use it any how but have to go and set it up as generic remote controller in your studiosetup in Cubase 11 pro. After that you have to use the learn function and go true each midi program number to see and set it up. It's easy but it takes some time to get it running but it's worth it. there's no latency in the faders or knobs so if you have this issue there's something going wrong. For people who bought this to use with logig X and Garageband they have made a driver for this. You just have to search the site a little bit. If you mess up use these function to factory reset: Press <,stop and scene buttons when turning on to usb. You have to wait at least a couple of minutes and don't turn the device off. You can reset with scene and cycle botton to when turning on. It's like a lite reset. when the buttons your holding flashes let them go. There's a driver that works for the nanokontrolstudio I don't know were I got it today 3 Nov 2021. It's called advKorgUSBMIDIDriver.plugin. with this plugin the Korg nanokontrolstudio works perfectly. when your done and the Mac 2018 see it you must hold down scene and marker buttons at start up and the Korg goes in cubase mode. In studio setup choose the Mackie control in the top of the same screen choose nanokontrolstudio control both midi in and out press ok and your done. Mine works now without any problems all function work only the individual rec arm button does not work but I think I can set it in the Korg editor what I have not used because it doesn't communicate with the device. Hope this will help a lot. 10-11-2021 I have reset correctly now and all funcions work perfectly. I'm using it with Cubase pro 11 and have no problems. To put it in Cubase mode hold the scene and <marker button it lights all scene buttoms up. Let it go and be sure in the studiosetup the midi in and out is set to your nanokontrole and your set to mackie control and that's it. There is a driver for Garageband and one for Logic X so it should work now in those DAW to. Go to Korgswebsite to download them.

This is a great little mixer for the price. I've been using it on Logic Pro X, and it works flawlessly. All functions work as they should. If you use it via USB, it's practically plug and play. If you use it via bluetooth, you have to assign it to Logic each time you start, which is a little cumbersom. Also note, the faders are not motorized, so the use of automation on your DAW is a little limited. But I set Logic to 'latch' and it works fine. Considering that the cheapest mixer with motorized faders costs $600, I'm okay with making due. The job wheel is a great feature, especially considering the cost. And the transport buttons are also very nice to have. Add to that dedicated mute, solo and record buttons, and pan knob, and this has most of what you need for general mixing. Much better than using a mouse. I use mine for mixing 6 to 8 tracks for a podcast, and it's been a perfect, low cost solution.

I'm not really sure about this thing yet. I got really excited when I saw this third generation of the nanoKONTROL online... it coincided with me finishing the renovation of my desk and getting my home studio together. I looked everywhere for reviews but being that it's such a new product they're hard to come by. I've always been interested in the nanoKONTROL... When the first gen came out it was the first of its class... it looked super promising - a portable little mixing board... awesome, I thought. I went to guitar center to try out a demo and the display model felt so freking dirt cheap that my stomach churned. I was baffled! It was a cheap toy piece of junk and half the knobs and the switches had fallen off. That was an automatic NO for me. The GC experience kinda deterred me from the second generation all together. Now that I'm getting serious about mixing and recording I needed a little control surface for my small desk, primarily for faders. The new nanoKontrol studio was one of the smaller, cheaper-but-still-decent looking options. I went to B&H in NYC for a demo as Guitar Center doesn't even have them in stock. They didn't have it plugged into anything but I ttested out the feel of the knobs and faders in comparison to the gen 2 model they had on display. The quality is definitely an improvement. The faders and knobs felt sturdier and better, albeit not by very much it was still enough for me to make my compulsive purchase. Of course, I first made sure they had a good return policy. I just unboxed it and plugged everything in. I don't care much for the wireless feature since it creates the chance of a disconnection and consequentially you would have to restart your DAW to reconnect the device. Batteries are also expensive and I've also read that the battery life on this is absolute crap. I don't mind the USB cable so I went with that. In the box was the cable and the paper quick start instructions in multiple languages. The instructions stated that if you use a USB you can only use the one included. Not sure why and I doubt this is true, but that was one of the notable disclaimers. FYI the USB wire is very short, maybe 2 feet long. I use a USB hub so I wish it were longer. Common for a desktop mini controller I suppose. I use Logic X so I loaded the program up after everything was plugged in. There's an USB/standby(off)/BT switch on the back of the nanoKontrol which is cool. Most passive mini controllers don't have an off option. Must've been made for the Bluetooth. I expected the device to just work right as I started up the program, such as an Akai product, but that was certainly not the case. I'm pretty tech savvy so it was pretty easy to log onto the Korg website and navigate through all their menus to download all the necessary editors, drivers, updates and plugins. But I can totally imagine this taking a really long time for some people who may not be computer-adept. The process of figuring everything out, getting it to work, along with reading all the online instructions for each separate instillation to make sure I did everything right (in one case you have to hold down certain buttons on the device to put it in update mode, select 8 and mute 8 I think) took about 20-30 minutes. It wasn't too bad and it definitely could've been worse, just nothing beats plug in and play. I also had to restart my DAW a few times for it to work before and after the updates. It seems like Logic gives a MIDI failure popup about how something isn't right every other time you open the program with the device plugged in. I'm pretty sure it still usually works though. BTW if anyone is wondering, I have a 15'' Macbook Pro w/ Retina Display and I still had to deal with the driver issues, so don't feel safe or exempt from that process just because you have a mac. After the device was finally up and running everything seemed to work fine and dandy except for the two track buttons. Couldn't get them to work and I read in somebody else's comment that they couldn't either. I thought it was an update issue but that didn't change anything. Turns out the track buttons are actually to change the banks, so they only take on meaning if you have more than 8 tracks. I was hoping they were just a scroll selecting buttons mimicking the select buttons on each channel. I thought the marker switches were the bank selectors but no. The jog wheel is a cool idea but kind of useless. It moves the playhead back and forth but each click of it jumps a pretty large distance. The stop rewind play controls are all good but I think a spacebar and the enter key are more satisfying. They don't click since they're pads. The pan knobs feel a little cheap, more so than any other button on the controller, but they work very well. Every pan increment is counted -1,0,+1,+2,+2 etc etc and that's the most important thing, function. I was pleased with that but this is where this falls apart for me. I bought this thing specifically for the faders, the main feature of the product. They feel decently sturdy compared to the previous generation models, but less sturdy than I recalled from the store demo. I probably build up expectations in my head before the unboxing. Now the worst thing of all is that the increments of the faders. I moved them all to zero. ( BTW they also don't change the mix until you've gone passed whatever it is set on the program, which was a relief)...Anyways, moving them down or up one increment decreases(or increases) the value of the volume by .3. Point THREE. So if I turn them to zero and move them the slightest bit possible it will go to -3, the next click is -6, then -9, - 1.2, etc etc. This kinda renders this thing useless for what I wanted it for... precise fader control. I bought new studio monitors recently so I could mix with the best db control possible on my budget. The imprecision just kills it for me. If this one thing worked well, the main freaking feature on this device... then I would've been satisfied. I don't get why they couldn't do it since the pan works perfectly fine. I guess there are too many increments possible for faders. Seems like a copout. These are probably the shortest 'long throw faders" possible. They would be cool for writing in automation I suppose, or mapping the button to parameters elsewhere, but it seems like it's a product that isn't great at what it does. I've spent hours trying to find a way to change this through software online to no avail. It seems it's some kind of problem with how the hardware outputs midi. Oh yeah the pads all feel nice, kinda wish they were colored though, like if record was red. select was yellow, play was green or something, etc that would be great. It gets a little confusing in the dark to look at only white lights. I guess the white on everything makes it more versatile over multiple DAWs, and t's also something you may want to program yourself, but It's a little annoying to have to look at the computer screen to figure out which track is which, seems like I bought this to make my workflow simpler but I'm not used to it yet. All the white light makes it confusing to look at at first glance. Maybe it will be easier if I continue to use it but honestly my laptop seems like it would be easier to work on. tl;dr: Overall it's a very pretty product, Korg clearly spent a lot of money making it look cool, but that's no excuse for function. I don't want to just look at it, I want it to help me work. I wanted to love it, I really did. The fader imprecision just ruined it for me. I will probably end up returning it. My laptop seems like it'll be easier to work with and the nanoKontrol studio kinda just adds more wasted time to your workflow. If I'm going to have to click on the faders in the DAW with my mouse just to make things precise after the faders, then why would I even need this thing in the first place? The entire point was to eliminate my need to click on the software mixer. Oh well. It's a cool little tool to have but I really don't think the thing is worth the $160.00 with tax. Even if it was tax free that's still too much. If it was like 80 bucks I'd keep it. Heck I'd take out the Bluetooth feature if it made it cheaper and helped the fuction of the faders, I wish Korg invested in making the thing more precise rather than adding a useless wireless function that poses problems with potential disconnects and latency. If the device was maybe an inch longer vertically, the faders could've probably been great and precise. As it stands I think I'd rather have the money and the extra desk space, however small that desk space may be. I could also just use the almost 200 dollars to save up for something of much better quality with motorized faders or a small screen. Oh and obviously this thing doesn't have motorized faders, just in case anybody was confused about that. That would've be amazing though. I'd spend 200 easy if this thing had motorized faders, led button color control, maybe some sort of indicator of which track is which with a small led/lcd/oled, and most importantly, precise incremental fader control. But with all the things this is almost good at... meh. Hope this helps anyone thinking about getting it! Cheers! Edit: Got around to using the wireless finally. It came with batteries which is cool, unless I got a store return and the people at the store lied to me. The wireless feature is pretty sweet, you can adjust the brightness of the pads in the settings to save power and choose when the device should go to sleep, but the downfall is that every time you want to use it you need to open Audio Midi Setup settings on your computer and connect the device to Bluetooth there. Just connecting it from your computer's BT setting doesn't work you need to do it in the audio program and scroll through menus to get to the right place to turn it on. In addition, if you have disconnection you have to restart your DAW, this isn't really a problem for me because I use Logic on a modern mac, but pro tools takes eons to load up, I would hate to have to restart it 4 times in just in a couple minutes. If you use the MIDI settings and then the Bluetooth settings, the device will come up as two separate midi controllers in Logic's control surfaces menu, which can get confusing, especially if you're mapping certain parameters to one of the on screen controllers and the other won't register it. Then if you restart your program because of another DC there is a chance that Logic will recognize it as an additional third (and so on) device on your list and again, you will lose all your settings. I mapped the jog wheel key command for zooming and then just by plugging in my interface the nanoKontrol in bluetooth mode disconnected on me and the settings were lost. Too much of a pain to rewrite the key commands and then go in and delete the old ones, again. This thing is kind of a waste of time and I find myself spending too much time trying to get it to do what I want rather than just working.

Getting the drivers and software installed is an exercise in masochism but once you figure it out, it works well. If you want to use it for music, i honestly can't think of any other cheap, wireless controllers. If you are using it for lightroom and midi2lr, skip it. It just doesn't work well

Because I use a DAW that doesn't recognize the automatic configuration, I had to do it manually button by button, but once I did this, the operation was glorious! I felt like a real sound operator again. Having the REC button and analog faders back is incomparable, it speeded up my recording process a lot, everything was excellent.

Korg nanoKONTROL Studio Mainly purchased this to use on the ipad pro and specifically with auria pro. I have no use for this anywhere else because I have a hardware production setup and don't use computers at all for music production. Apparently the Korg needs a bit more power than the usb3 dongle with the lightning port can provide. I had a pickle of a time trying to get the korg to be recognized. it powered up a few times (I would disconnect to plug it to the editor then plug it back to the dongle) but then it just would not power up anymore. Got a powered hub and now the korg turns on each and every time, so it seems the new apple usb3 dongle with usb port and lighting port does not provide enough current for both the ipad pro and the korg. and I use the 29w mac power brick with the usb to c lightning cable (1meter). As mentioned, the korg Kontrol Studio works with Auria Pro in PRO TOOLS mode. You can set this mode with a combination button press when you power up the Korg, so the editor is not needed unless you want to change some parameters for your unique setup. In my experience using this with Auria Pro: faders work mute/solo/record work. those buttons also light up when they are activated. "Select" was not working. i am not sure what it could be used for in auria pro pan knobs work transport (<< ,>>) buttons work. you can cycle through 8 channels of tracks with the "TRACK" buttons (< , > ) eg. 1-8 , 9-16, etc. there is no visual feedback from the korg or on screen to show which 8 tracks the korg is controlling. you just have to keep count how many times you press those "TRACK" buttons. I mean you could press a mute or move a fader, etc to see a visual cue that way. the jog wheel works the same way the ffw/rew buttons do. if you move it one click to the right, the timeline scrolls continuous, same in reverse. if you click the jog wheel forward 2 or more times it jumps to the end, and jumps to the top if you do this counterclockwise. i prefer to have the jog wheel "jog" the timeline when you are rotating the wheel and STOP when you let it go, but i have yet to find a setting in the korg editor that will allow this to work. This is most likely how the software is implemented (Auria) and not the korg or its editor. this product is small, lightweight and works well out of the box. Recommend it.

As all gear claims, works with iOS. It didn’t, neither did the nanoKontrol 2. It will do nothing with GarageBand. It did work on one Korg app. You need a computer to program it. That why I get a new iPad every year to stay away from computers.

Lo compré tras ver muchas reseñas positivas tanto del nanokontrol 2 como del studio. Mi experiencia personal es que si tienes pocos dispositivos midi no hay ningún problema. Ahora bien, como tengas muchos, lo más probable es que no sea una experiencia agradable. El dispositivo sólo funciona si está entre los 10 primeros puertos midi de Windows. Estos puertos midi están alojados en el registro de windows y hay una aplicación de korg para liberarlos.... en teoría. Porque en mi caso aparecen bloqueados y no los puedes liberar. Cuando lo compré y empecé a ver que no funcionaba ni era detectado me metí en youtube y empecé a ver multitud de videos y mensajes en foros explicando cómo resolver el problema.... malo. Señores de Korg, no me gusta pagar por un dispositivo por el cual hay que hacer un master para comenzarlo a usar. Así que lo voy a devolver. Lo compré para hacer uso de él y que me resolviera un problema y sin embargo lo que ha hecho es crearme otros.

Pratique et très utile, mais pas facile,à programmer avec certains daw

この手のフィジカルコントローラー、Avid、Mackieはじめ色々買いましたが場所を取るわりに出番が少なく、結局マウスでやるのが早いので全て手放しましたが、今回VST instのHanz Zimmer StringsのMIDIデータ入力用に購入してみました。 マックOS BigSur11.6.1でドライバー不要で、電源を入れるときに、キューベースモード、ミディコントローラーモードなど選んで立ち上げると、すぐ認識し、初期設定は簡単でした。 音量とビブラートを同時にスライダー入力したかったので、とても便利になりました。 BlueTooth接続用にエネループも購入しましたが、こちらのレビューにあるように、電池の取り出しが不便そうです。 そこで写真３のようにナイロンの端切れを乾電池の後ろに挿入するようにして、取り出しやすく一工夫しました。 ムービングフェーダーの入った重く大きなものより、手軽に持ち歩けるし、必要なVST inst関係のデータ入力にはこれで十分でした。 フェーダーのタッチもいいです。 おそらくキューベースのミックス作業には使わないと思いますが、もし使ってみて便利だったら？？こちらの情報アップデートします。

Ci sarebbe da scrivere un libro intero sui prodotti MIDI, in questo caso ci limiteremo a qualche riga. La NANOKONTROL STUDIO è un prodotto versatile, funziona bene ha un bell'aspetto ma soprattutto è wireless (Bluetooth). La compatibilità non è come quella delle sue concorrenti, mi spiego meglio, a differenza delle altre, dove sul web trovi ogni tipo di configurazione, template etc, per questa non ho trovato molte informazioni utili per settaggi e configurazioni. Se non conosci il linguaggio MIDI, può essere un problema serio, ciò non toglie che è un prodotto utilissimo e ben fatto, lo consiglio.

Delivery - Excellent. Build quality - better than expected. Performance ? Read on.... I have a Korg nanoKontrol 2. Great product. Slightly short faders but fits on the bottom of a Macbook real sweet. Also works with several KORG apps on iOS - iMS20, iElectribe and Gadget. Best is iMS20 by far. One button switches between mixer and synth. If the app had Link it would be the total business. Only drawback is the USB lead. Not good on an old school 32 pin iPad with a camera adapter, better on a Lightning equipped model. So the wireless version should provide all of the functionality of the USB only model right ? Maybe a bit more ? Wrong. All my KORG iOS apps recognise it and flag it as connected. So let's try some of them.... iDS10 ? No. Well I could hope.... iMS20 ? No. iElectribe ? No ! Gadget ???? After all, there is a button on the front panel labelled "SCENE" - maybe you could cycle between scenes ??? Very limited mixer control only. Jog wheel, scene buttons and FF/FR buttons are redundant. The track buttons are duplicated by the Select buttons above the faders and don't illuminate.... Leave them alone. And why is there a label with Wireless on it painted out ???? I will keep it. In a few years time, secondhand iPAD Pro's will be within my grasp and a Link locked 8 track version of Gadget will run like clockwork. Oh dear KORG it could have been so much more..... How about some downloadable profiles for the editor ??? TIP - If you connect this unit to the editor on Mac, the SCENE lights will come on and the unit will no longer talk via Bluetooth. If you can find a factory reset mentioned anywhere on the net, you are well clever. I used the same routine as described for the wired version ? Hold down CYCLE and the two TRACK buttons and power up using USB. Worked for me. UPDATE 20/5/22 I HAVE UPGRADED TO IPAD AIR. WITH KORG ELECTRIBE WAVE, THIS UNIT PROVIDES FULL CONTROL. 2 BANKS OF 8 FADERS INSTANTLY. WELL DONE KORG FOR IMPLEMENTING. INCREASED RATING TO 5 STARS