[Oneota]

I'm thinking about dropping a chunk of change on a new Roland workstation, but I'd like to hear what owners think of 'em.

How easy are they to use? How customizable are the d-pads?

If you needed to set it up to switch between voices in the space of less than a beat, how would you do that? Other thoughts?

http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...88&ParentId=83

[Tomchu]

A friend of mine has one. You can contact him at j_faisca2002 (at) hotmail.com -- I'm sure he'd be happy to give you the low-down, as he does some pretty high-end stuff on it.

[synthfiend]

--How easy are they to use? How customizable are the d-pads?

Depends on what you mean by customize. What do you want them to do? Are you talking about triggering samples? If so, they are great.

--If you needed to set it up to switch between voices in the space of less than a beat, how would you do that? Other thoughts?

Less than a beat? I always keep "patch remain" on, when doing that. When you're in peformance mode, tho, the effects don't seem as strong even if I've enabled them. I've had no wierd pops or anything and have performed live with it a few times now.

Do you have any experience with any other Fantoms? Like the S?

You can head over to fantomized.info and check Artemio out. He's a great guy and there are plenty of nice folks on the site. Try going over to Guitar center for a demo. Use headphones unless you can hear over the din of "rappers" making "beats" on the MicroKORGs.

:-D

[olePigeon]

I would highly recommend this one:

http://www.rolandus.com/products/pro...62&ParentId=72

Nothing like digital polka.

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by synthfiend

--How easy are they to use? How customizable are the d-pads?

Depends on what you mean by customize. What do you want them to do? Are you talking about triggering samples? If so, they are great.

My main use for this would be pit orchestras, so I would mostly use them as digital timpani, assigning each pad to a specific note using that voice. So I would need to be able to roll on them (and have it sound decent, with proper, roll-like attacks, etc)

Originally Posted by synthfiend

--If you needed to set it up to switch between voices in the space of less than a beat, how would you do that? Other thoughts?

Less than a beat? I always keep "patch remain" on, when doing that. When you're in peformance mode, tho, the effects don't seem as strong even if I've enabled them. I've had no wierd pops or anything and have performed live with it a few times now.

Yeah, one of the other uses is the continuo part on Messiah, where I need to switch between harpsichord (is there a decent harpsichord patch on this?) and a 1700s-ish organ sound very fast. And by fast, I mean that at one point, beat 1 is harpsichord and the and-of-1 is organ (the realization I'm working from probably intended the part to be played by two separate people, we just don't have that luxury ).

Originally Posted by synthfiend

Do you have any experience with any other Fantoms? Like the S?

You can head over to fantomized.info and check Artemio out. He's a great guy and there are plenty of nice folks on the site. Try going over to Guitar center for a demo. Use headphones unless you can hear over the din of "rappers" making "beats" on the MicroKORGs.

Naw, this would be my first workstation-class device. My current setup is a Yamaha PSR-520, which looks like the crap you buy at Target but is actually in a different class. It's more of a "pro-sumer" synthesizer; not the cheap Karaoke-machine garbage, but not a workstation either. It's served me well, it just doesn't have the quality of patches that I need anymore. It's very easy to setup to switch between patches quickly, though, which is something I haven't found on most workstations - they generally are more cumbersome than they really need to be, IMO.