Each kit has 16 sounds that you can toggle on to the eight pads via a button press. In the drum kit department, you get all the usual suspects from your standard, room and jazz drums, through your ’80s power ballads, a rather nice TR‑808, orchestra and a suitably silly special effects kit. And then you find yourself playing along with the drum pads and having a really great time. Using the arp with the filter and effects can quickly develop pretty much any sound into something interesting. There are multiple time divisions, multiple note orders including a random option, a range of up to four octaves, and swing, which ranges from bright and breezy to drunk and disorderly. The arpeggiator is a stand‑out feature, and Akai devote the whole keyboard to providing settings for it. The effects work OK over the speaker, but you get a much more rewarding experience with headphones. The filter is a lot of fun, the reverb does the job, and the chorus brings in a good bit of wobble. These simple additions to the run‑of‑the‑mill sounds can transform them into something else entirely. In Shift mode, they become Attack and Release and Hi and Low EQ. The row of four knobs along the top gives you the resonance and cutoff of an internal filter and the depth of reverb and chorus you can apply to the sound. As GM soundsets go it’s not half bad, and the Mini Play has a couple of tricks up its sleeve to take it from not half bad to quite a nice experience. Scrolling through the onboard sounds you quickly realise that this is a General MIDI set, although Akai don’t refer to it as being so. It works great, springs back to the middle smartly and feels like it’s the thing you’ll accidentally break off when taking the keyboard to a gig.
At the top left is a fun red joystick that provides the pitch bend, modulation and some expressive velocity control. The pads have that firm heaviness of the MPC and are very dynamic, particularly when listening on headphones. Compared to most speakers that you find in a mini synth this is pretty nice. The feel of the keys is good, it manages to accommodate both my hands easily over the two octaves, and the sound out of the speaker is responsive and good enough to work with.
Miniplay log upgrade#
Akai have upgrade the pads to the same ones found on the MPC range of machines. It’s had a makeover since the last version, wrapping it in red, giving it a slight incline to the front panel, rearranging the knobs and improving both the keys and the speaker. The MPK Mini Play MkIII is portable, fun to play, with some decent sounds and just enough tweaking to make it interesting. Mini Pianoįirst, let’s look at it as an instrument. There is a bit of crossover, but it’s odd and slightly confused to the point that it’s perhaps easier to see the Mini Play as one thing or the other, rather than both. It has a bit of a split personality: by itself it’s a cool little musical keyboard, while connected to a computer it becomes a MIDI controller.
It can be battery powered to sit it on your knee and enjoy playing the sounds on the bus, in the park or wherever you may be without any other gear. It sacrifices a few knobs to benefit from a bank of 128 internal sounds, 10 drum kits, and a speaker. The MPK Mini Play MkIII is a lively looking mini keyboard with most of the features of the MPK Mini MkIII. Akai’s MPK Mini Play MkIII is a small keyboard with a dual identity.
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