Keith McMillen Instruments has announced a new Drum Pad Emulation mode for the QuNeo 3D Multi-touch pad controller.
WIth the new mode, the QuNeo can now approximate the feel and response of popular MPC-style drum pads such as the Maschine, Akai, and Korg, as well as others.
“All other drum pads have a mechanical switch that does a one-time detection of when the pad is hit, so the feel of the pad is largely determined by the type of switch and where it is located,” explained Keith McMillen, president and founder of KMI. “QuNeo continuously senses the varying pressure and location of the player’s gestures, so we can acquire the displacement, velocity and acceleration data of the hit to generate pretty much any response and feel.”
The QuNeo In Use
QuNeo’s Multi-touch, X-Y location and continuous pressure capabilities give it a unique advantage over traditional MPC-style drum pads. Each of the four corners of every pad can be programmed independently, enabling grid-style clip launching. Also, performers can trigger and hold a note, and then retrigger the same pad with another finger.
Two rotary decks, nine VU sliders, and 17 pressure sensitive switches also let QuNeo be used as a complete controller solution. 251 responsive LEDs also let you focus on playing and not on the computer.
For immediate out-of-the-box usability, QuNeo ships with presets, templates and scripts for popular music software including: Ableton Live, Serato Scratch, Traktor, Apple Logic, Mixxx, Reason, Battery, BeatMaker for iPad, and Korg iMS-20 for iPad.
QuNeo has a street price of $199.00 USD, and is available now. See the KMI site for details.
I am actually buying this tomorrow. Any one have experience with it? Looks liike it could be a better solution than my launchpad.
It’s great! The corners seem a little finicky, but you can remedy this by playing with parameters like corner isolation for each pad in the quneo editor.
I have it and my complaint is that it’s so much fun that it’s easy to lose track of your musical objectives! It’s completely mesmerizing, in the best way. 251 LEDs!! It’s dreamy.
Ordered mine yesterday. It should be here Monday. I am excited to see what I can make it do.
Yeah yeah. One of the best and versatile midi controller out there I backed this with kick starter.com and am so happy to do so. All the best controllers rolled into one. Thanks KMI team.
Deviating from the supplied templates isn’t so easy and starting from the ground up is very hard. Many of the cool features are baked into the templates and you don’t have control over them.
The Quneo is (mostly) very good to use solely for input, but keep in mind of many of the whiz bang visual feedback features are currently at the whim of KMI programmers and what they want to support. For example, LED following in Live is “hack”.
Expect to spend many, many hours of setup if the templates don’t match your needs exactly. Not to say it isn’t worth it, but I feel like it was sold as a much more “plug n play” device than it is.
Thanks for the heads up. I am wanting it for easier control over effects params and such in realtime and for the mpc style control. I’ll see what cwn be done when it arrives tomorrow. I read the manual through yesterday and I’ve been watching the youtube tutorials so I can, maybe, get it up and running pretty fast. I might use it in conjunction with the Launchpad and have the Lp launch longer playing samples and such and the quneo for more “improvised” style atmospherics and leads. we’ll see 😀
It’s always been described as plug n play so no drivers and the basics are mapped at default. Pads to keys.
And that’s the great thing it is open source code and manual setup. I also have the Novation Zero MkII and NI Maschine midi controllers which does have automap software and do self configure. Believe me that’s just as unconfigured and requires time to setup and tweak to establish YOUR best config for YOUR style of workflow.
Over time as more sell and more people use it, we will see more formatted templates same as we see with the Novation and Maschine midi contollers.
This is a great controller, loving the LEDs (who said trippy) and its a great user interface for Tracktor and VSTs in my case with Cubase.
Well worth a demo….
It definitely isn’t plug and play with ableton… I have been getting it setup and getting the hang of it but what it really needs it automapping like launchpad. The editor is ok and will take some time to get used to but I think the possibility is there for it to be really good. The pads are stiffer than what I expected and the pressure needed on the sliders is more than what I thought it would be too.
After spending a week with it and having nothing but a nightmare I return it today. I had constant trouble getting to work as advertised and even once it satrted working it seemed to always bug out shortly afterwards. Don’t get me started on the buid quality. Clips wouldn’t launch, the pads were so stuff and had no movement at all, the sliders/faders were loose in their slots and rocked and moved in strange ways when pressed, and it just overall looked and felt super cheap. My launchpad actually looks and feels like an ipod compared to the quneo’s dollar store mp3 player appearance and feel. Maybe mine was one of the early runs or something but it was junk. The editor software was a hit or miss thing for me. Even after watching all of the tutorials and reading the manual and following the directions to a t half the time the quneo still wouldn’t work properly. I never got anywhere near the mpc style control they boast about and barely got the clip launcher to work reliably. I thought it might just be mine or that maybe I was missing something but I have heard similar horror stories from other owners of the quneo (and other KMI products) so I am pretty sure not all of us are that inept. I mean I only have 15+ years of experience with music gear so I might not have enough experience to make this little controller work right 😛
this company only has one issue…
P R O D U C T D E S I G N !