Roland P-6

The Roland P‑6 is a pocket‑sized sampling powerhouse.

It’s easy to criticise Roland for milking their classics in multiple form factors, but when it comes to the Aira Compact range I don’t hear anyone complaining. They’re fun, affordable and ridiculously portable.

So far we’ve seen a drum and bassline machine (T‑8), mono and polysynths (S‑1 and J‑6) and a voice transformer (E‑4). It made sense that some kind of sampler should be next and the P‑6 takes its inspiration from the Roland/Boss SP range of workstations, in particular the 303/404. As with the others in the Aira Compact series, it’s designed to get quick results in its own way, rather than to simply miniaturise a vintage instrument.

Big Picture

Like the 303/404, the P‑6 parks samples in pad slots across a number of banks, in this case six pads and eight pages. True to the simplicity of the original SPs there’s no separate sample pool or library: the samples that are loaded in the pad slots are what you have to work with until they’re overwritten. Samples are triggered from the pads, though the P‑6 lacks velocity sensitivity. It does have something even the latest 404 doesn’t: dedicated step sequence buttons. This makes sense as the device is too tiny for finger drumming.

While there’s no project structure, there are 64 pattern slots which share the palette of 48 sounds in memory. And like the 404, effects play a major role. As well as reverb and delay send effects, there’s a suite of performance effects designed to be punched in and tweaked on the fly.

Like other samplers of this type, there’s a chromatic mode (called Keyboard mode) for playing a sample melodically. Incredibly, this is polyphonic, a major win over devices like the otherwise more sophisticated Digitakt. What’s more, one sample per pattern can be played using a granular engine. The P‑6 pairs really well with a MIDI keyboard. Depending on the MIDI channel you can have all 48 sounds spread across the keyboard, play the focused pad chromatically, or play the granular sampler.

Small Details

The Aira Compacts are pocket portable. They’re less than 19cm across and the plastic shell makes them ultra‑light. The tiny, low‑profile knobs are just on the right side of usable. Most importantly, the Compacts have an onboard lithium‑ion battery which is charged via USB‑C and can keep you untethered for three hours. Unlike meatier devices such as the 404 MkII and Ableton Move, any USB charger will do, not just a high‑power adaptor.

Sensibly, the connections you’d use in the studio (USB‑C port and TRS MIDI I/O) are on the back, while audio connections are on the front panel and are less pokey when the P‑6 is on your lap. A single audio out serves for either stereo line output or headphones. You can also plug in a headset with a mic and sample in via the same port. Otherwise, there’s a more conventional stereo audio input for capturing from other devices. The USB‑C also has class‑compliant stereo audio capability in both directions. Next to the audio connections are analogue sync in and out, which alongside the MIDI Clock support via the TRS or USB connections makes this a useful little box in various scenarios.

The P‑6’s back panel is home to the power switch, a USB‑C port and 3.5mm MIDI I/O sockets.

Step Up

The step sequencer provides an easy route to getting things happening on the P‑6. Select a pad, tap some steps and you’re off. You can also record from the pads in real time, either quantised or freeform. Patterns can be up to 64 steps long, spanning four pages. The mod cons we’ve come to expect from hardware sequencers are mostly present: you can set trigger probability or frequency and you can print parameter automation in real time or by holding a step. There are no variable track lengths or speeds though, just the parent pattern settings.

Pressing the Keyboard button switches you into chromatic play mode for the currently selected pad, with the step buttons doubling as a virtual keyboard. Pads can be triggered or gated, and you have both a pitch envelope and a shared amp/filter envelope per voice. Sixteen notes of polyphony are available on the device, with a limit of eight notes per step within any sample’s sequencer lane.

Another feature that Roland have absorbed from current trends is sequence reload: the ability to skip back to the last saved snapshot of the pattern. However, this is where what I think of as ‘the curse of Roland’ starts to rain on your party. As with so many other Roland grooveboxes and drum machines, simple operations like saving or duplicating a pattern require multiple steps and can only be done while playback is stopped. This is madness.

The other slight wrinkle is that because you have 48 samples spread over four pages and two layers, and patterns can draw upon any of these, it can be difficult to hunt down the sounds used in any given pattern to edit, mute, etc. Some self‑organisation is probably advisable so you can work in kits of adjacent samples.

Sampling

You’ll want to get your own stuff on to the P‑6: there are some nice basic sounds on there but also some long vocal samples that get pretty annoying when you trigger them while browsing through the pads. A sample utility provides a means to edit and send samples from your computer on to the device (but not the other way) but there are also numerous options for direct sampling.

Sampling happens straight to a pad, and only works if the pad is cleared first. (It would be nice to have an expert preference to allow direct overwriting). When you enter Sampling mode, the P‑6 starts monitoring all available audio sources, with the neat trick of level metering across the step button lights. You can then hit Sampling again and the P‑6 starts capturing. When done it goes through an offline process of normalising and writing the sample. Simple.

A few settings affect sampling, mercifully set from the knobs when in Sampling mode rather than a menu. You can choose a sample rate from 44.1 down to 11 kHz, mono or stereo. These settings really matter as sample memory is very limited. Maximum sample time is just under three seconds for stereo at 44.1. You can set sampling start mode to manual, threshold detection or sync’ed; and can define a sampling duration either as free or to a set number of beats.

Grabbing a set of one‑shots from another source or quickly sampling your environment with the mic works great on the P‑6. Other SP‑like workflows have limitations. Resampling is a key part of beatmaking on the SPs, bouncing down loops and sections onto other pads. Resampling is always on on the P‑6: the mix out will always be captured if you sample during playback, and if you use sync trigger and a set time everything is taken care of for you. Easy, but the time limit is an issue: at full quality you can just barely fit in one bar at 90 bpm.

I was also hopeful that the sync and fixed time features would allow for looper‑style functionality, but it’s scuppered by a couple of issues. First, you can’t turn off resampling, so any external source is always mixed with whatever the P‑6 is playing. That is, unless you go into a submenu and turn the Pattern level to zero, then sample, then go in and turn it back up again. And secondly, after sampling, the P‑6 downs tools and does the normalise/write routine.

The length limit also precludes the classic technique of sampling a passage of music then chopping. However, there is chop functionality. Samples can be chopped into an equally spaced number of slices within a pad, after which they appear as separate notes in Keyboard mode. More flexibly, you can sample directly into chops. This doesn’t use the ‘lazy chop’ method of dropping marks in real time; rather, it lets you set a number of slices before sampling, then sample into each in turn.

Again the polyphony in Keyboard mode is a real power here, because as well as classic chops you could set up a whole drum kit within a single pad, with the compromise that you lose the ability to set individual sound parameters.

Sound Design

Basic sound settings are found on the right‑hand side of the panel (the left side is dedicated to effects), including Pitch and Level, and Start/End times. You can also toggle mono/poly playback, gate/one‑shot modes, and looping or reverse functions. A dedicated Lofi button adds sample‑rate reduction, with intensity set somewhere in a menu.

Further settings (a rich set) are accessed via four Sample Edit menus. Within each menu, key parameters are assigned to the knobs for easy access, while others are reached and controlled from the main encoder. Within these menus you’ll find your envelopes, filter types and settings, effects sends and mix controls.

The Sample Tool is a handy editor and transfer utility, although exporting samples from the P‑6 has to be done bank‑by‑bank in disk mode.

It’s fantastic to have this much control and sound‑shaping, but it’s strongly hindered by the display. I think I could live with this amount of menu diving — it’s only one level compared to the almost unusable MC‑101 — it’s just that many menus and setting names are undecipherable when rendered on a four‑character, seven‑segment readout.

Granular

The granular sampler mode is such an unexpected bonus that I wonder if it was a hackathon project where some enthusiastic developers thought, ‘I bet we could make it do this,’ and it ended up shipping. One sound per pattern can be assigned to the granular engine, and the granular settings get saved with the pattern, unlike any other sound settings.

The Granular button itself triggers the current grain sample, but it works best in Keyboard mode. You can control the size, shape and spread of grains, and the density (number) of grains up to eight. There are even more obscure hieroglyphically labelled parameters for reverse probability and jitter. Rather than complicated modulation of the sample playback position, you can simply set a position and scanning speed (which can be backwards). The step buttons light up to indicate the ‘playhead’ position. Brilliant!

Effects & Performance

Like the SP samplers, effects are front and centre on the P‑6. In addition to the delay and reverb send effects that can be fed from individual pads, the front panel features six buttons for engaging the large range of master effects. Looper samples and loops a chunk of the mix output and lets you then manipulate it, while Scatter is the ubiquitous Roland stutter and reverse pattern generator. Both of these effects ought to be great for creating fills, but are a bit hit‑and‑miss. Pitch, Delay and Filter are more useful. The MFX button holds all the other onboard processors, which are mostly great, such as the isolator filter, resonator, tape stop and vinyl effects, and regulars like chorus and reverb.

Like the SP‑404 there’s a Bus system, so you can route pads either through the effects or to one of two clean busses, and adjust submix levels (which you likely won’t as it’s too hard to find). An easy shortcut allows you to quickly toggle pads between effects and bus A, which serves as a bypass. I’m not sure if it’s a bug that this cancels assignments to bus B.

When performing with the P‑6, the other main thing you’ll probably do is flip patterns, which is done from the step keys in a dedicated mode. This works fine although, as on all Roland boxes, pattern changes are always queued to the end of the pattern, and therefore limit spontaneous fills. The other issue is that pattern changes reset the effects sends, so reverb and delay tails just stop dead. The one saving grace is that Roland always include a Step Loop mode, which I love for momentarily freezing and looping playback on one or more steps.

It’s the most feature‑packed and deep device in the range so far, with unexpected gems like the granular voice.

Conclusion

The P‑6 slots neatly into the Aira Compact range, making sampling and sample‑based beatmaking fast and fun. There’s a lot of familiar SP heritage in here, but it’s taken in a new direction with the step‑sequencing‑focused workflow. It’s the most feature‑packed and deep device in the range so far, with unexpected gems like the granular voice. Polyphonic sample playback per channel made me start to see the P‑6 as contending with way more expensive workstations. In other areas though, its scope is somewhat smaller: notably the short sampling time limits the possibilities for resampling, looping or classic SP chop workflows unless you’re OK with low sample rates, and the display is just not an adequate match for the feature set. Let’s not forget how inexpensive it is, though, and how many use cases it has. It’s an ideal travel companion, it’s a very capable sample‑based drum machine, it works great as a sound module with a MIDI keyboard, and you could even justify picking one up as a multi‑effects module for a desktop synth rig.

Information

£189 including VAT.

www.roland.com

$219.99

www.roland.com

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