KORG KAOSS PAD v1.1.0 [MAC]

KORG KAOSS PAD plugin interface
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A question came up recently: is the physical KP3 compatible with the new Kaoss Pad plugin from Korg? Honestly, I didn’t even know Korg had made a Kaoss Pad plugin until I went looking. Sure enough — there’s a brand new Kaoss Pad plugin, along with a whole batch of other new plugins including a microKORG plugin, released about five days ago. According to Korg’s site, it’s on sale for the moment, but by their own account that’s only good for another day.

As for the actual question: is it compatible with the KP3? Short answer, no. Nothing is really MIDI-compatible with the KP3 in practice, because getting that thing set up is such a huge pain to begin with. That said, I’d bet I could eventually figure out how to map the KP3’s touchpad onto this plugin — but that’s a separate project for another time.

So here it is: the Kaoss Pad dynamic effect sampler. Funny thing is, Korg shows the KP3 right next to the plugin in their own marketing, and the two don’t actually look a whole lot alike. There’s a reason for that. Per Korg’s own framing, this isn’t a software version of the existing Kaoss Pad series — it’s a completely new design, including new effect algorithms, built as its own type of effect plugin. And that’s accurate. This is not a one-for-one emulation of the KP3, and we’ll get into why in a second. For now, let’s grab the plugin and throw it on something.

The Basic Interface

Running the demo, which gives 20 minutes before it stops producing sound. I loaded up a drum loop and started going through the basics — dragging the mouse around the pad gets you something like a low-pass filter, and there are a bunch of different effect banks to flip between. The effects genuinely sound good.

There’s a hold button, same idea as the KP3: find a parameter position you like, let it sit, and it locks in that last position. There’s MIDI functionality that shows you what note assignments would correspond to positions on the pad if you were controlling it that way — though from what I can tell, you can’t sweep as fluidly with MIDI notes as you can just dragging the mouse around live.

You get 12 favorites you can store right on the interface, and an “inc” control — I think that’s short for increase or decrease, though I’m honestly not sure why they’d phrase it that way — which cycles through presets. There’s also a looper that’s pretty similar to what’s on the hardware Kaoss Pad. There’s a lot here. You could just keep going and going.

Where It Gets Interesting: The Edit Page

On the edit page — I’m looking at the ping-pong delay right now — there are graphs, knobs, and hover-over info on basically everything. There’s a lot going on. From what I can tell (and let me be honest, “what I can tell” is genuinely all I’ve got here, because there’s an initialize option that I think wipes all your presets, and a manual link that goes nowhere useful) — I don’t think Korg has actually finished writing the manual for this thing yet. It’s that complex.

As far as I can work out, every effect lets you assign up to five different parameters to control at once. Take the chaos assign preset as an example — it’s got four or five effects happening simultaneously. Go into the touchpad view and it looks like it’s controlling all of them at once as you move across it: nothing happening on the delay in this particular patch, but the early reflection time changes as you move across one axis, the pitch shifter changes pitch tracking, the looper changes where the loop point sits, and the filter does a sweep. Listen to it running and there’s a lot of crazy stuff happening at once.

On top of that, there are four LFOs available simultaneously, and you can change the waveshape on all of them. Then there’s a section I genuinely don’t know what to make of — it looks like a compressor, since it’s got attack, release, and gain, and you can choose which part of the effect chain it’s compressing (the whole signal, or just one specific effect — I set mine to compress just the filter). It’s kind of wild how much this thing can actually do.

There are 25 different algorithms on top of all that — chorus, flanger, an IR loader I genuinely don’t know how you’d use, and the icons for some of these crack me up. There’s clearly a ton you can do with this plugin. It’s nice that it’s this expansive, but the learning curve is going to be insane. I don’t even know what a “virtual patch” is or where you’d start with one.

Presets

Loaded up a more melodic loop to hear a bit more of what this does musically. The preset browser is filtered by category — delays, color filter, chaos (which seems to layer synth sounds on top of everything), looper, modulation, oscillator, reverb, vocal. There’s a lot to it.

Korg makes mini touchpad controllers, and I’d assume those map onto this plugin reasonably well — might actually be worth picking one up just for this. If you had a dedicated controller you could work the touchpad physically instead of dragging a mouse around, that would be a much better experience. A manual would help too. Or just some how-to content out there somewhere. I can’t stress enough how complex this thing is.

Is It Worth It?

Non-sale price is $150. When I first saw Korg was charging that for a Kaoss Pad plugin, my gut reaction was no way — especially since their own marketing shows the KP3 right next to it, which would lead you to assume this is just an emulation of that hardware. It’s not. The interface actually looks a bit closer to the KP Quad, which was, well, pretty much a dud.

If Korg puts real support behind this — proper how-to content, or at minimum a working manual — I think people could genuinely start figuring out everything this plugin can do. Right now, I’m not even sure how the mixer section works; you can click into it and type text in somewhere, and I have no idea what that’s for. There are so many menus, so many bells and whistles, knobs everywhere. I’m glad the basic functionality is solid on its own, but to get real value out of everything this thing can do, Korg is going to have to support it properly. Without that — some kind of documentation or how-to content — I can’t really justify spending $150 just to hack my way through it blind.

That said, it’s one of the most robust multi-effects plugins I’ve come across. Might be worth a longer, dedicated deep-dive at some point just hacking through it and seeing what I can actually figure out. I don’t especially want to be the one doing Korg’s documentation for them for free, but if it comes to it, I might end up doing exactly that anyway.

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