WORLD OF MUSIC ; PORTABLE KEYBOARD - Latest Portable Music Keyboards, Synthesizers and Music News

Korg Liano is now available in 6 different colours – Black, White, Grey, Silver, Blue and Red – so which one looks the best?

Launched last year, Korg’s Liano is the slimline 88-note digital piano with a beginner-friendly, soft-touch key action. It is also portable: you can power it from batteries and it has a pair of built-in bass reflex speakers.

We are telling you this again because Liano is now available in six colour options. In addition to the original black, you now have pearl white and metallic grey, silver, blue or red options to choose from.

So which colour looks the best? Perhaps, if you want to play it totally safe, black is the obvious choice (no one’s going to be scared by that if you decide to sell at a later date) and the grey and silver options look rather conservative, as well. The white Liano is a little bolder, but we’d be worried about marking its pristine finish.

Which leaves metallic blue and red. There are quite a few red keyboards on the market already – but the blue option is genuinely distinctive. As such, this would be our choice, but feel free to disagree because the choice is in your hands.

In terms of performance, of course, it doesn’t really matter. The beating heart of all the Lianos is an Italian grand piano, and there are seven further sounds to play with, too. The Korg Liano is a mere 7cm tall, weighs 6.2kg and offers USB MIDI and audio.

As you can see, the control set has been kept simple. There’s no screen, so sounds are selected via a labelled dial. And includes reverb and chorus effects.

Korg Liano costs £339 /$330, and the new colours will be available soon. Find out more on the Korg website.

Noise Engineering has introduced Yester Versio, a three-tap delay for Eurorack modular systems that they say is designed to be straightforward and easy to control.

What they say about it:

“Yester Versio comes with controls over panning, delay feedback, and delay time, but we didn’t stop there. The Time control interacts with the Even/Triplet/Dotted switch, allowing for flexible delay syncing. These also work with the Tap button and jack input, making it easy to sync Yester to the rest of your patch and create interesting rhythms.

Use the DJ-style filter to shape your delays. Add flavor with Chorus, a bipolar control that adds a bit of clean pitch shifting or LFO-modulated effects. Turn up Fold for some gentle saturation, then gritty wavefolding, and at the top of the knob, to add in chaotic suboctaves for a bit of doom.

And of course, because it is a Versio, almost everything can be CV controlled.”

Yester Versio is based on Noise Engineering’s Versio stereo DSP platform. It is basically a DSP hardware ‘brain’ that can be flashed with a variety of firmwares, so the platform can be used for a wide variety of functions. If you have any of the modules based on the Versio platform, you can load and test any of the Versio designs. You can also buy ‘hot-swappable’ overlays, to customize your panel to match whatever firmware you load.
Yester Versio is available now for $393. Alternate panel overlays are available from $16.

Varia Instruments has informed us that they have released an updated version of their RDM20 rotary DJ mixer.

The RDM20 is a fully analog, two-channel rotary DJ mixer, with one phono and two line inputs on each channel.

The mixer features two different three-band isolator-banks. One is set on the master and there’s another one on each channel. While the master isolator is quite steep and raw, the character of the channel isolator is more soft and smooth.

What Varia say about what’s new with the RDM20 REV. B:

“At a first glance, it seems as not much had changed – besides a new 115/230V voltage selector switch, the device looks pretty much the same as before. The big changes though, happened inside the mixer: The whole circuit board was revised and some electronic components were changed too, such as the connectors on the backside.

The update is based on the experience we have gained during the past years. The understanding for electronics, mechanics and audio design did steadily grow, especially with the development of the RDM40. While the hardware treatments made the device even more sturdy and durable, the audible signal has even less distortion and a lower noise floor than on the previous units built.”

Find out more information on the Varia Instruments website.