Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head

A shade over ten years ago, I reported that I had bought an Alesis Q49 usb/midi keyboard controller. I had fully intended to use this keyboard when sequencing songs, but it was too large for my computer desk and it joined its comrades in the music room shortly after its purchase. As far as I can recall, I used it precisely once.

Over the years, I've gotten used to 'writing the dots' as if I were a composer from the pre-computer age. This is painstaking work but more importantly, it forces me to imagine in my mind, then sing, parts so that I can write them down. I'm not very good at transcribing rhythms, so frequently I will simply plonk down the notes as crotchets, then play around with the note lengths until what I have written matches what I have imagined.

Sometimes it takes a long time for the light to go on in my head: this time, it wasn't until someone asked on the Musical Practice & Performance Stack Exchange site a question about small midi controllers. It wasn't a very good question, but it moved me sufficiently to search for such a controller on eBay. I quickly found this and ordered it without much delay. I ordered it on the evening of 23 February and was given a delivery date of after March 15; it arrived yesterday, a week earlier.

The unit itself is fairly small which is good, as far as I'm concerned. The action is somewhat 'chunky' which is not so good but not that important. Surprisingly, the keyboard is 'weighted' or 'velocity sensitive', meaning that the harder one presses, the louder the note played. I'm not sure that this is an advantage and the chunky action makes me doubt this more. Apart from the octave buttons (on the left), I couldn't get much joy out of the rotary control and other control buttons. The documentation is minimal; one is supposed to download a program from the manufacturer's site and indeed I did so, but I couldn't get much out of this either.

Reason recognises the keyboard without problem and I was able to play along with songs in this program. My regular MIDI sequencer was more problematic: whilst the notes that I played were recorded, I could barely hear them. The rotary control appears to change the instrument patch but I couldn't find a way to increase the volume produced. So it seems - on the basis of maybe fifteen minutes exploration - that I can use the keyboard with the sequencer when I am laying down chord sequences, but if I want to play anything expressively, I will have to do it in Reason. Fortunately this program has the ability to save anything recorded in it as a MIDI file, so I can still play to my heart's content and then edit whatever needs editing. I have never got to grips with editing within Reason: better the tools one knows.

All I need now is a song; I've actually been very productive in this respect, writing and recording five songs since the beginning of December. One - silly - song was written in about fifteen minutes, sequenced in a few sessions and vocals recorded within a week. So now I'm waiting for new ideas.