Back when I started music, you basically had a choice of instruments. Good, expensive ones, or cheap rubbish. Music keyboards especially conformed to this pattern. That was the era when electronics were really starting to make themselves felt. The rubber pads of a ZX Spectrum micro-computer for instance. Not for me. I paid three times as much for a Dragon 32 because it had a decent keyboard. Nonetheless, a cardboard and polystyrene package containing a Spectrum arrived at our house one morning. My father, not being too much interested in this new-fangled computing thing, rang the company up and told them they'd delivered it in error. Oh don't worry, just throw it away they said. So pleased were they the lost item had been found that they sent him another by return post.

Now the musical instrument world had the same sort of problem. A mate of mine owned a terrrible plastic box with yellow printed keys. It made the most horrendous noises known to science, and eventually, under the stress of my amused curiosity, began to emit random unintended noises that bore no relation to the control settings. It just sat there on the floor making it's own mind about what to do until we unplugged it.

Things have improved since then. Makers of cheap musical instruments have improved the quality of their gear noticeably. Buy a more expensive keyboard and a whole hidden world of electronic possibility reveals itself. I was mightily impressed to try a Korg thingy worth about a cool