Need advice: Midi/Master-Keyboard

[ruonitb]

So, I started to make some electronic music (mostly D'n'B and 'beats' ) and I would like to buy a master-keyboard since programming everything with my mouse is quite frustrating.
I will continue to program drums with my mouse but I use a few different synth-VSTis and coming up with melodies and programming/playing them without a keyboard is quite frustrating.

So, I'm searching for a small master-keyboard (i.e. 25 keys) with USB connection. For now I'm not sure if it needs to have any extra stuff like pitch/mod-wheel.

I read about the KORG nanoseries but I'm not sure if the nanokey2 is any good (I read mixed reviews). But the combination of nanokey2 and nanopad2 seems to be nice. ( http://www.thomann.de/gb/korg_nanokey_2_black.htm )

I also saw the Akai MPK mini ( http://www.thomann.de/gb/akai_mpk_mini.htm ) which seems to be a combination of nanokey and nanopad bar the mod/pitch-buttons.
However, I'm not sure if the pads have any use for me since I'm not gonna play drums with them anyway.

This seems to get recommended quite often as well:

http://www.thomann.de/gb/maudio_oxygen_25_3rd_gen.htm

But I'm just not sure which of these functionalities will be useful. I need this for homerecording only; I simply want something that makes it easier to record/program melodies etc. (basically anything except the drums) for my D'n'B stuff (and I guess that sustain-, pitch- and mod-wheels/buttons could be quite useful for this as well).

Any advice appreciated.

 

[vespiz]

I'd look for something that has full-size keys, ie. NOT the Korg Nano or the Akai mini -series. But that's just me, my fingers don't like minikeys.

The Oxygen is ok, I guess, seems a bit flimsy and cheap, but would probably serve you just fine. Pitch/mod-wheels come in just about all MIDI-keyboards, except those mini-versions.
Roland A300Pro is quality, but it's not cheap (and I hate the fact that they've made the keys smaller and smaller with each version..).