A slim, USB-bus-powered DAW control surface: eight faders, eight pan knobs, solo/mute/record on every channel, and a transport section with cycle, marker and track-select buttons — 293 g in a 325 × 83 × 30 mm slab with no power supply, no 5-pin MIDI, and no pedal jack. Sources agree almost completely on what it is for: it is the cheapest credible way to get eight physical faders onto a desk, it disappears into a backpack, and one cable does everything. They also agree on the trade the price buys — the chassis is 30 mm tall, so the fader throw is short, and the plastic is plastic. Where they divide is setup. The unit arrives in a generic MIDI CC mode and has to be switched into a DAW-specific Mackie Control mode before its transport, banking and lights work properly; reviewers who found that switch describe a surface that behaves like hardware costing far more, and reviewers who did not describe hours lost. Windows users hit an extra hurdle the Mac has never had, because macOS is class-compliant and needs no driver. Prices swing hard: Korg's own shop asks $119.99, while dealers routinely sell it for $52–$70.
About this product
The eight-channel nanoKONTROL2 of 2011: eight 30 mm faders, eight pan knobs, per-channel solo/mute/record buttons, and a transport section, over a single mini-USB cable. Not the nine-fader 2008 original nanoKONTROL, and not the battery-powered, Bluetooth nanoKONTROL Studio. Black and white are the same unit.
Korg's original nanoSERIES invented the flat-pack MIDI controller in 2008: keys, pads and faders squeezed into slabs thin enough to sit in front of a laptop. The nanoKONTROL2 is the 2011 second draft of the fader one, and it has outlasted almost everything launched alongside it. Eight faders, eight knobs, twenty-four buttons and a transport section, powered and connected by one cable, still on sale and still being reviewed a decade and a half later.
Its reputation is unusually stable, and unusually split down the middle. It is the answer people give when someone asks for faders on a budget — and it is also the controller people describe fighting for an afternoon before it worked. Both things are true, and the reason turns out to be a single setting most buyers never find.
