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🛒 Yamaha Montage▸geni.us/Yamaha-Montage6
#Fantom8 #Roland #Synth
Hello and thanks for joining us at the Merriam Pianos RU-vid channel. In this video, we’ll be taking a deep look at the Roland FANTOM 8 workstation.
To call this thing a beast would be a huge understatement - it’s actually hard to believe just how much stuff this thing has going on. Let’s dive in!
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Background:
The first thing to know is that the FANTOM 8 is also available in FANTOM 7 and FANTOM 6 forms, which shorten the keyboard to 76 and 61 notes respectively. The functionality otherwise is the same, but the FANTOM 8 has the full 88-note, PHA50 action.
What exactly differentiates a workstation from a digital piano, stage piano or synth? A workstation is designed to be a piano and a full computer all at once. You can record and sample at a complex level, and have a control center for both live production and as a part of a home studio rig.
Instead of working with a DAW with a mouse and keyboard, a workstation gives you a large tactile set of surface control.
Features
Let’s start with the synthesizer section of this instrument. It’s loaded up with 1000’s of internal sounds, and you can mix up to 16 given tones at once as a full 16 zone synthesizer. Each individual sound can be edited in a huge variety of ways. It really does have fully loaded synthesizer capabilities.
Roland refers to the FANTOM 8 as using Modeless operation, which means at any given time, everything is active and available, as opposed to certain features only being accessible in certain modes of operation.
Sound engine wise, it’s equipped with V-Piano technology, the new ZEN-Core processor and the SuperNATURAL sound engines. Accessing the various engines is quick and intuitive, as is editing the various tones via Roland’s piano designer. There’s also a host of effects that are accessible for fast, real-time editing.
It’s also very easy to save presets via the Scene functions. Scenes aren’t limited to any set of parameters, but rather takes a snapshot of the entire keyboard when you hit save, including samples, sequencer and specific backing tracks.
As we move to the middle of the keyboard, we come to the touch display, which is also super easy to use.
The sequencer is next up, and consists of 16 tracks. Within each of the tracks, you can set up to 8 variations.
The number of options and ways to surprise with a tactile instrument like this is infinitely greater than a DAW as it allows for an incredible amount of on the fly surprises.
Next up is the motional pad. This allows you to mix and match between 4 different sounds by editing with your finger directly on the user interface - super cool!
Finally, on the far right of the keyboard, you’ll find the various pads, which offer yet another level of control.
In terms of DAW integration, it’s actually crazy how well this thing integrates automatically. It’s very mature and very well developed - clearly the intention was to make the FANTOM 8 as compatible with software as possible.
Connectivity
There’s of course a ton of connectivity options here. We’ve got ¼” outs, XLR outs and 2 different types of sub outs which are very handy.
There’s also an analogue filter line out, as well as in and out gates, USB memory, and 3 additional USB ports for external devices.
Next up is dual mic inputs, 4 control pedal ports, and of course, MIDI in and out.
There’s also a modulation wheel and tone bend wheel as well. Finally, in the lower left corner you’ll find the arpeggiator and transpose.
Summary
At first glance, the FANTOM 8 might seem like a super niche instrument for the upper end of the professional market. This isn’t actually the case. Musicians of all kinds can have a blast with this instrument with a surprisingly intuitive learning curve.
We think there’s plenty of non professional composers, arrangers and musical directors who would love this instrument, and could get a ton of value out of it.
Thank you for watching!
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17 июл 2024
