Alesis makes a lot of small, inexpensive music gear with a lot packed inside. Buy something Alesis and you'll get what you expected, once home you will likely find a whole bunch more functionality, sounds or something under the hood.That it's almost a shame, as lots of potential customers may have passed this up, not realizing how much it could do.
Yes, it was "nano," that is, small. But the sounds were huge sounding, high quality (16 bit 48k) and it had 64 full notes of polyphony all packed into its tiny 1/3 rack space.
The name is also not right. Yes, there were amazing acoustic and electric pianos in there, all you'd need, but also bass, organs, mallet percussion, synths, sound effects and all manner of splits and layers.
They kept it simple and hands on, two knobs got you to all 256 sounds manually, and I never got so far as to try and use program change messages to switch between them remotely do any editing as you could with an external editor, apparently.
I, like most, I suspect, who got this, did so for the cheap and available sounds, the immediate gratification of the front panel. It was fun, but if you like to tweak, forget it.
It was not multi-timbral either, one patch at a time, kids. That was the ultimate downside for me, and I moved on looking for a rack unit that had performance set ups I could program per composition in my sequencer. A pallet of sound I could use AT THE SAME TIME.
I guess I just wanted more. I had plenty though, I just wasn't appreciating it. I've seen these on ebay for like nothing, and I've just set up an alert to tell me when one comes up.
I want my NanoPiano back.
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