The Lumi keyboard by Roli

This is a lovely little piece of kit. Beautiful to use, highly portable and, ooh, coloured lights. And portability is at a premium when you want to do some music but also sit in front of the fire :-)

When you buy one of these keyboards, you also get some software, which I had my first proper play with this evening. It's really, really good. Suprisingly good! And sometimes an interesting sound can be genuinely inspirational, and this evening I ended up writing a new piece of music for the project I'm working on.

I had the keyboard plugged into Ableton, the music software which runs on my laptop. That has a nifty feature that enables you to go back and capture something you've just played. So when I went back to listen to some ideas I'd improvised, I was delighted to find the playing was all in time and that it was usable. My first improvised performance!