As GM soundsets go it’s not half bad, and the Mini Play has a couple of tricks up its sleeve to take it from not half bad to quite a nice experience. Scrolling through the onboard sounds you quickly realise that this is a General MIDI set, although Akai don’t refer to it as being so. It works great, springs back to the middle smartly and feels like it’s the thing you’ll accidentally break off when taking the keyboard to a gig. At the top left is a fun red joystick that provides the pitch bend, modulation and some expressive velocity control. The pads have that firm heaviness of the MPC and are very dynamic, particularly when listening on headphones. Compared to most speakers that you find in a mini synth this is pretty nice.

The feel of the keys is good, it manages to accommodate both my hands easily over the two octaves, and the sound out of the speaker is responsive and good enough to work with. Akai have upgrade the pads to the same ones found on the MPC range of machines. It’s had a makeover since the last version, wrapping it in red, giving it a slight incline to the front panel, rearranging the knobs and improving both the keys and the speaker. The MPK Mini Play MkIII is portable, fun to play, with some decent sounds and just enough tweaking to make it interesting. Mini Pianoįirst, let’s look at it as an instrument. There is a bit of crossover, but it’s odd and slightly confused to the point that it’s perhaps easier to see the Mini Play as one thing or the other, rather than both. It has a bit of a split personality: by itself it’s a cool little musical keyboard, while connected to a computer it becomes a MIDI controller. It can be battery powered to sit it on your knee and enjoy playing the sounds on the bus, in the park or wherever you may be without any other gear. It sacrifices a few knobs to benefit from a bank of 128 internal sounds, 10 drum kits, and a speaker. The MPK Mini Play MkIII is a lively looking mini keyboard with most of the features of the MPK Mini MkIII. Akai’s MPK Mini Play MkIII is a small keyboard with a dual identity.

Akai mpc mk3