New instrument/gadget/toy!
I spent some Christmas money on this Korg Mini Kaoss Pad 2S. I had the MiniKP2 several years ago — had to sell it in a rough patch — and I've wanted one again for a while. The primary thing a Kaoss Pad is is an effects box; you put sound into it, and select any of 90 effects to it. (There are 10 bonus settings that are standalone synths from the related Mini Kaossilator 2S.) Each effect has two parameters — the equivalent of two knobs on a standalone box — and the X and Y position of your touch on the big pad applies the effect with those settings. Most effects will trail off nicely when you let go, or you can activate the "hld" button to hold the last position you touched.
Audio can go in either via the built-in microphone, the line-in minijack, or by playing a file from the optional MicroSD card. (There are six demo loops available if the card isn't installed.) This is part of what the S upgrade is — it's supposed to stand for Sampler. You can play short WAV clips or MP3s in loop, one-shot, or gated modes (longer files won't loop entirely cleanly), and record to the card in either sample or master mode, making the thing a serviceable field recorder. Selecting a file on the card is a little fiddly and menu-divy, but it works well enough.
Effects range from the straightforward — filters, flangers, delays, reverbs — to the esoteric (#16 simulates the effect of a record player suddenly stopping; #35 applies timed filters so as to make everything sound like it's saying "Yoi Yoi"), with many combinations and variations. A number are beat-matched to the music playing by either auto-BPM recognition or manual setting by number or tap-tempo. There's a set of five different vocoders.
I'll be using it to effect and record my homebrew stuff, but right now, I'm just getting entirely too much amusement out of playing MP3s through randomly selected weirdness.