Roland

As Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi celebrates his 75th birthday, we conclude our history of this innovative company by coming right up to the end of 2004...

The latest in Roland's SP series of phrase samplers can also double as a computer and audio interface, and PC users can take advantage of a bundled Cakewalk sequencer/mixer. Is this the best SP yet? We find out...

I want to replace our band's two Roland MC50 sequencers with the MC80. Although the MC80 only holds one song at a time in memory, it can play back multiple songs directly from the disk drive, but I was wondering if there was a significant pause time between songs when playing directly from disk?

Isn't it time for the guitar to become the prime means of control for synthesizers instead of the keyboard?

At £1099, the Xa is the most affordable keyboard in the Fantom range. But, inevitably, features have been removed to make it such a bargain. Have Roland thrown out the works from the workstation?

Roland's innovative V-Synth can now be reprogrammed with a RAM card, effectively turning it into another instrument. The VC1 card turns the clock back to 1987, perfectly recreating the S&S tones of the Roland D50.

This new card narrows the gap between Roland's VS-series machines and computer recording systems by allowing the use of third-party plug-ins within the multitracker environment. We test the card, its bundled plug-ins, and the first of the brand-name offerings from Universal Audio.

The Fantom X is Roland's best-ever workstation, but it has suffered from one or two annoying omissions, such as the ability to import Roland's own sample format. We explore the Fantom Xr rack module and ask if the v2 OS and editing software provide the solutions?

Part 1: The V-Synth repackaged Roland's groundbreaking Variphrase technology, creating a powerful new kind of sample-based synthesis. Now there's a rackmount V-Synth, and (as you'll discover in Part 1 of our two-part review) it's more powerful than the first...