Here’s something that could be handy for on the go musicians. The USB roll-up keyboard features 49 keys, 128 instruments, 100 prerecorded rhythms. And you know, it also rolls up. There hasn’t been much use of the roll up keyboard. Some musicians are on the go all the time with Logic Pro 7 or Pro-Tools. Both those programs are heavily MIDI-based, and usually used by electronics musicians everywhere they go.
With the new USB support you can have a MIDI controller everywhere you are. Since the keys don’t look push-sensitive you’re going to loose certain humanization features such as velocity, but you can always edit something like this in the program. The keyboard runs $46.00, so the onboard stuff probably sounds like crap. But with all the features a program like Logic Pro 7 has, you wouldn’t be using many of a keyboard’s onboard features anyway.
USB Roll-Up Keyboard [the red ferret journal]