I’ll preface by saying I really don’t want to get the Mashine mk3! I heard the Nektar Aruba is a good alternative, similar in price and value, but from the videos I saw it seems quite finicky! (I read the gear FAQ.)
I just found out about the LinnStrument, admittedly after being put off the ContinuuMini by a reddit comment, as someone said it to be ‘strictly worse than the LinnStrument’.
I saw that it comes in pad form, and thought I could kill two birds with one stone and use it a drum pad in addition to a musical instrument.
I saw that QfG made a video with it, but it wasn’t a review or anything. I understand there is no key travel like the mk3 would have, is that a deal breaker? I haven’t really started my journey and this would be my entry.
So those linnstrument type devices that “scan” a touchpad like surface have some issues for percussive playing. The biggest one is they cannot deal with properly allocating “velocity” because instead of one hit they detect either the start, middle, or end of a hit and then sort of guess how loud that was. With any other type playing your fingers wont hit as fast or press down on the pads so then it is fine, but for percussion… mwah. Another issue is hitting two spots at exactly the same time (so with one hand, 0ms difference). It gets confused there too and then corrects when pressing down but for percussion again… we often don’t do that.