Plays, sounds, and flows brilliantly.
I'm a home-studio pianist/hobbyist. Over the years I've owned synths, mid-range workstations, and a stage piano (a Kurzweil K2000R, a Korg Krome, and a Roland RD-800), plus various volcas and brutes. This is my first flagship board, and holy bloody hell, it's amazing. Is it perfect? No. Is it glorious? Yes. Unlike the earliest of early adopters, by purchasing it after the firmware was updated to 1.5, I've only used it with those added-but-essential features (from SuperNatural acoustic tones, to tone/scene ratings and search functions, from the vocoder to expanded pad control modes). The workflow is sane and elegant, and though there are some new habits to learn (changing scenes after editing a tone loses those edits), this is trivial compared to how it sounds and what it can do. The VPianos are glorious to play, and the 88 keys the best feeling/responding/musically inspiring keyboard I've ever played. The EPs are a bit weak, but there's an infinite amount of room for tinkering. The synth engine, whatever the hell Roland wants to call it, is amazing. The filters are smooth and musical and character-ful, and the editing of partials/tones is straightforward enough for ridiculous levels of sound design (the two step LFOs in particular are powerfully interesting ways to modulate sounds over time). I'm not a "does this Jupiter patch sound exactly like that Jupiter patch" person, I just know that the JP patches are a delight to play. It's a workstation with thousands of sounds: many of them I'm happy to scroll by, but I get lost in others, and then I get lost in combining those with still others, and then it's trivial to record sketched-out ideas. I've only just started playing around with the Logic/Mainstage integration, and it is intriguing, plus one way to work outside some of the Ableton-like pattern recording limitations . TR-Rec for drums is everything one would want, and is also great for tonal instruments. Sampling is clearly a work in progress. 5 bloody stars.
MATTHEW
Undisclosed