this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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I would get a small midi keyboard with drum pad, it would be much more versatile
Came here to say this, get a MIDI keyboard OP. It's basically your gamepad for digital music production. You mostly have at least 2 octaves of piano keys and a drum pad, also some knobs and sliders you can map. They are very well supported by modern audio production software.
A very cheap one would be the Akai MPK Mini MK3 for example.
Not OP but I've been wondering how do do this myself, so thank you for that recommendation.
My recommendation is the Novation LaunchKey Mini. Very similar to the Akai they recommended but I personally bought one 5 years ago when I started, so I prefer it for that reason.
Although this could be true with the Akai, I do know the LaunchKey comes with a 90 day trial of Ableton as well, which is the DAW I use to this day. Just my $.02
I do music production (mostly lo fi rock, no midi) and got curious about those a while back and picked one up. Installed Vital. I've never put anything out with it but it's a ton of fun to play with. You could totally use one to create some great music if you wanted.
I guess it also depends on what type of musician you are. If you come from traditional instruments and want to record some nice drum patterns or so it's a really nice tool. Otherwise you have to artificially add some random off timing (like ms) to recreate that natural feeling. I could imagine many people can also be more creative playing on an instrument (which a midi keyboard basically is), getting that haptic feedback instead if just clicking things together.
Oh! I think maybe I wasn't clear because I was still drunk. I was co-signing the keyboard. There's one next to my desk.
Oh my bad, it sounded like you never used it!
Yup, you're going to want at least a tiny keyboard at some point soon.
If too many controls is intimidating in your plugins, either try one but into the DAW like ReaSynth in Reaper which will be basic but still fairly powerful, or something like Decent Sampler which has knobs that do a bit of tweaking but are still most just preset sounds. Many will have ADSR and some basic effects and that's it.