I love this little box. It's easy to get up and running on it quick, but there is so much to learn on it. But, I can hand it to either of my kids and they'll stay entertained making their own music. I love the looping, and how you can set it to work within various scales. I pipe it into a Boss digital recorder and use it in creating other music, but it really can stand on it's own.
The Kaossilator is a cool piece of kit. If you have a musical competence, it's possible to get competent sounding music coming out of it quite quickly.
It works by allowing you to choose and instrument at a time and to layer these to form two longish bars of music.
I normally start by tapping out some drums. You can experiment until you are happy, and then you have to repeat the pattern with the record button pressed. As such, it's important to get the tempo right first (tap out a high hat or something) as you don't get a feel for the beat or your place in the sample period.
You also need to have a good sense of what key you are in if you are going to try to put anything approaching a melody over the top. You also need to know the scale being used. Now the Kaossilator has them all, but you are unlikely to be able to find them in a hurry on stage. So, you want to jam along with some blues - you set up the blues scale with the flattened 7th and move your finger up and down. It needs to be this way as everything is pretty relative - although the corners of the touch pad will provide absolute pitched notes - i.e. the tonic.
The weakness of the touch pad is also its strength. Some odd randomness - constrained by a scale and gate/arpeggio means the accidents can end up sounding cool and edgy.
Problems ... there really ought to be some kind of interface to set it up via computer. Even bluetooth on a phone would be good. The sound quality is excellent. However, changing key and your rhythm isn't for the faint hearted. You set it once and stick with it for as long as the sample is being used. Once you power off, your work is gone. Recreating the same thing again is not easy. Correcting and erasing mistakes seems horrid.
There are just so many options. What a shame Korg hide the options in various places. The key to understanding Gates and Arpegios appears on a card. The voices appear in the User Guide. A simple printable A4 sheet would be useful along with say boxes at the bottom to note down what you did you create a particular soundpiece.
Overall we love it, it makes good music and has a good range of voices. If you like trance, D&B etc - you could probably compose a whole piece. However, if your core rhythm varies and you like to change key, you need to find another way to integrate this into your music.
I'll have a go at a video review on this maybe as you need to see it to understand.
I bought this synth to play with in the evenings when I was working abroad a few tears ago. It has banks of synth sounds, and the ability to build looped phrases. The unit has an integrated touchpad, similar to those you get on laptops, that you swipe and tap to produce sounds.
The whole thing is quite intuitive to use and heaps of fun.