Roland Fantom Workstation Keyboard | Overview and Demonstration

Hi, I'm Scott from Roland and I'm proud to be here on behalf of Guitar Center showing you the Phantom. The Phantom is the centerpiece that represents a new direction for Roland. Functionality and design are everything and more than you would expect. from the Phantom brand, it is an extremely diverse instrument with logical playability and workflow for every musician. There are three different sizes, an 88 note version with RT 2000 action that sounds wonderful and a 76 and 61 note version with our best synth action yet. The most important thing is that it sounds amazing and it sounds beautiful, so let me give you a quick

overview

of the front panel.

The left side is the controller side. The right side is the synth IDE and of course it is surrounded. The centerpiece is the touch panel display. The left side, the controller side, has sixteen zones and these can be internal or external controllable zones. It has eight infinite encoder knobs and eight sliders. These sliders also serve as drawbars for the tonewheel organ. The right side is the synthesizer and the creation side. Of course, you have this amazing filter section, you have envelopes, tone filter and amplifier, and remember everything is visual in the phantom, so it's amazing, you have the sequencer of three different types.

I'm recording step beats and also normal linear recording, you have rhythm patterns, you have the pad modes, multi-function pads and you have the sound category buttons where you can easily select any of the sounds, so as I mentioned you have the side of the controller and the synth side and in the center is this big touch screen, now the Phantom is this modelless concept and everything is represented in one scene, a scene is essentially a snapshot of everything the Phantom does, everything in the front panel, so there are four banks, there are a total of 512 scenes, they are all organized by color, if you want, that's really good.

There are so many different scenes that you may want to be able to select a specific one very quickly. You can label it by color, by classification or by note. There are master effects. You have the analog filter, which is really nice. You have a transform function. you have a pad that you can modify the sound very quickly you have control da W the menu allows you to go really deep into the Phantom you also have a chain mode here where you can chain together your favorite scenes for very, very fast playback you also have different views, you have the zone view where you can see it in one for 8 or 16 tracks and on the screen at the same time, which is really cool, under the menu you have these six infinite encoder knobs, which are used to make more adjustments. the sound or controlling your D aw the user interface on the phantom is basically the ultimate workflow, it's the power and flexibility of digital, but the immediacy of analog let's start with the sound of a piano, now the pianos that They are here they are from our V piano which is the best technology we have developed for the piano incredibly beautiful feeling in every key range the V piano is incredibly responsive I love this sound now you can access the V piano piano designer and this is great because everyone has their own idea of ​​what the perfect piano is, you can detail the tuning, you can detail every aspect of that piano sound so you can make it perfect just for you.

There are also some really cool electric pianos, they have that touch that you need too, so if you really want it. dig deeper, you really have that power, everything you want from your electric piano, there are also some amazing lead sounds, there are also some amazing electric drum kits and acoustic drum kits, and if you prefer to play the drum kits with the pads, too do you have that. The recent sound engine development and new technology we have with the Phantom allows us to unleash much more creative potential than ever before. Now one of the best things is that we have this patch complete and uninterrupted, I can basically have it. a 16-layer texture and I can move on to the next sound completely fluidly.

This is something really important for the live musician, so I have this texture that is really amazing. Now we also have the ability to create these textures that evolve a lot, for example in this particular. sound I have four different zones layered and of course I can mix them however I want. Now this particular sound has a very interesting movement. Look how it has this kind of evolving scene that sounds like it's endless movement. let's go in and look at this sound and what this is using is it's using the stepped LFO which is actually very nice and here's the stove grate, the stepped LFO and you can see that you have all these different steps that I can have different amount of depth and I can apply different curves and that's what gives it its texture evolving with the sound engine there are new filters there is a new digital filter and there is an analog filter let's look at the digital filter so the first thing I want What I do is to start the arpeggiator, so I have this cool repetitive thing and now let's take a look at the filter.

Let's note that everything is visual. It's nice now that we have the Jupiter filters, the classic Roland filters and other classics. old filter types, you also have the 12 - 12 - 18 - 24 DB slope, that's cool. You also get some really cool original filters with the new sound engine. We've really expanded the frequency range for filtering, so it's really awesome. Okay, let's dive into the analog filter okay, so what I'm going to do is start another arpeggiated pattern and you have a level amount that you can modify here. You can also go in and play with the overdrive.

Alright, you have your filter. settings here cutoff and resonance now your filter again everything is visual even on the analog filter you see everything which is really cool so I'm going to go in and play with the effects and make some EQ adjustments Wow, there's also this really cool pad feature of movement that you can have for different sounds, but whatever your favorite is here and then you can modify between the four different sounds to adjust the level and you can really create some cool evolving textures this way and now like I do. As I mentioned before, the ghost is completely diverse, there are many different ways you can create music, it creates sound, performing the sequencer section is really amazing, now there are three different ways you can do this, you can do it in TR recording, which is kind of our typical Roland.

Drum machine type recording there's step timing and then there's linear recording so let me show you a little bit of each so I'm going to move on to TR recording and as soon as I press play I'll see my grid these are the events on my grid , so basically I'll play a note or an instrument that I want to play and then I'll put it on the grid, so I'll just make a basic drum beat. Now let's take a look at this. I just created a clip of that pattern so every time I press stop and go to record something else it will create a new clip which is cool so it was TR recording so now let's go and select a different part and record something in time step, so I just press time step and I can adjust the rhythmic duration of the time step moment and I just play and now here we have the idea, it's so fluid and so much fun now we just record one last part.

Which will be basically I'm going to play it well, now there are a couple of interesting things. You can set it to a one-beat count and measure or a weight for the note. I'll make him wait for the notes while I play it. I'm going to go and then I'm going to set the input quantization in the grid, so essentially I never hear my rhythm errors coming back, so it fixes them, which is a good thing, so you can see that I then went and modified in the mixer. I adjusted the levels, I put together the panorama, so it's really completely fast, it's perfect and it's really fun.

You spend more time making music, without wasting time pressing buttons. It's a really cool way we have the patterns organized on the Phantom. which are all clipped, so we have clips for each track, so each track is a different shape, you have a lot of different variations and you can pick them and change them in real time, so for example, I'm just going to do a little bit of riff. and modify some of these and move some of these patterns around so you can try a lot of new things and experiment with how you want to put your song together.

Now let's go one step further and go to another particular pattern and let's listen to this one so you have an idea right now. You can access many different post editing capabilities to have a loop switch where you can go in and repeat a particular clip a certain number of times. You can even change the length of that loop of that clip after the fact, that's really cool. You have pattern utilities where you can go in and quantize. You can mix everything as I showed you before. You can change the name. You can import and export these clips. either internally for the ghost or for your D to your da W, which is also really cool, you can mute certain tracks, you can solo the tracks, now this is where it gets really fun, so I can group them together.

I watched all of these clips in a particular order. and I can basically start creating my song so if we go and I have an intro chorus and an outro and I can preview how I've arranged them so that was my intro combo and here's a verse combo to get The idea is good, now at this point you have all these different patterns and all these different combinations and now you want to put them in a song to go to the group and now you can change the length of these loops again after the fact, you can change. from a four measure loop to a 1 measure loop if you want, but we really want to turn these clips into a song, so I hit create song and now I just choose the intro ad, let's go to the verse, let's make two verses, no.

I'm just going to use one for now, I'm going to go to the chorus, I'm going to do a chorus and now the ending and here's our song, so I go in here and this is the playback of our song. The nice thing about this is that I can skip a section in real time, I could even loop a section if you, if we really want to, and all this while it plays, this is cool, okay, let's take a look at the sampler . Now the sampler will hold 1.75 gigabytes, so you have a lot of stuff. that you can sample little short sections, long verses, you really have the ability here, so now you can store all your samples here, perfect for instant playback, but now let's go in and try something from scratch, okay, here in pad mode I'm going to select an empty sample bank, okay, now it's empty.

I have 4 different sample banks that I can choose from, let's go in and I'll play one of the rhythm patterns and try one of those rhythms. to go into sampling and I'm going to activate the self-timer so that as soon as I tap it starts recording, just record that bar and immediately the waveform appears. I can easily go and edit it if needed. spread it vertically or horizontally. I can do it easily too so I can get a good loop once I get really close, we look good and then I can go to sample, quick edit and I can loop and it automatically goes. to the pad super easy, very smooth now on the back of the phantom there are three external USB ports, so I can use them to power any other equipment.

In this case I'm turning on the juo 6a and there's also dual CV and gates so I have the CV and the gateway to the SEO as well so I have some really cool combinations and I also have the output of the SEO 2 going into the mix of the juo 6a and the output of that going into the phantom, so everything we hear comes out of the phantom of this into the stereo, meaning pretty basic stuff but a very, very interesting and unique way of using everything. The Phantom has the centerpiece of your team. One of the best things about the Phantom is that the da W integration has really taken it up a notch and we have incredible connectivity with lots of great da W apps, so let's open up the main stage.

Another cool thing about this is that it's kind of plug and play, you don't have to make any adjustments. it's like just looking at it, that's one of the best things, so we're looking here and normally I would be looking at this screen, okay, now I can easily, it's just our plane. I can adjust the sounds within the set, I can even skip them. the sets and immediately go to and now if you notice here also that each of these sounds has smart controls, okay, and automatically the smart controls appear here on the ghost, which is really cool, now you can also overlay any of the sounds of the Phantom with that in mainstage, so again you have a 16 layer type of environments, so in any type of situation we are using a program like mainstage where you need to havecomplete and immediate access to sounds from your computer, you can do all that directly. from the Phantom this is really amazing, everything can be controlled from the front panel of the Phantom, the DNA W integration allows us to open applications like logic and we have complete control of everything from the Phantom, so this means a lot so you can really If you have your computer and your

keyboard

, if you're sequencing at home, you can have them on the side and you can manipulate and do whatever you want from the Phantom, so, for example, I can go in and select tracks.

I can have the position of the song. control there I can also configure the loop any way I want to move it. I can also create. I have transport controls of course, but I can also create markers so I can easily have the markers do the position and create another marker, I have undo and redo, so it's very, very flexible, everything is from the front panel, like this this is really amazing. Another thing that's cool is that the pad mode allows us to have a little assistant in manipulating the da W, so I just go to control da W on the pads and then I can have up to four different screen sets, so if I want an environment different I can do horizontal and vertical resizing which is really awesome again. the transport controls I can also open the browser here and if I go further in the menu here I can open particular things in the browser like notepad, loop browser, media browser and editors and things like that, so that's really really impressive and again it's all from the front panel.

I haven't even touched the computer at this point. Another thing that's really awesome here is that if you go here to the ghost you have a couple of different menus to look at. I have a big screen and a big readout, you know, big so it's easy to see on stage. I also have all the clues. I can have up to 16 stereo tracks, 32 mono tracks, that's what will control it. it will be sent via USB, but I can also see all the smart controls on the instruments, so for example I have this drum machine and many third party instruments already have smart controls assigned to them, so they appear automatically.

I do not have to. There's something logical now, if I go here and we look at the smart controls for this particular instrument, okay, so you see them and there they are, they appear here, so here's an actual typical sequencing situation where you're using the da control. W and logically, so I have a synth bass part and I'm just going to use the transport controls, okay, very good, okay, now I'm going to move on to the third track, which is I have an internal sound, a nice electric piano on the Phantom and I'm just going to record that as audio, so here are the trucks, here's the audio for the electric piano and the bass.

Now just bring in the drums and we basically have our track. Very, very cool, super easy, very, very connected. Perfect operation. between the Phantom and the da W, another incredibly useful application with the Phantom and your da W is that if you're controlling backing tracks when you're playing live, a lot of people now have a Pro Tools guy behind the side of the stage running this. but now you can do everything from the Phantom, so if you have an environment where you have all your tracks in logic, you can use the pads to make sure that you know you can see all your tracks, you can use markers to get to your song.

You know, even if you have an emergency situation where you go off the grid and the drummer is not on the track, then you have an emergency stop, a panic button and a start here so you can stop it in the position where you're on the track and then make sure you press play again, you can have the click out of the sub to the drummer and the tracks out of the main outputs so you can control the stereo off the track and then you can fade it into the saved situation, that It's really cool, so it's great to sequence it at home.

It's also great for playing backing tracks live. All your creative and musical needs can begin and end with the ghost. Imagine creating music faster and more creatively. Like never before, there has never been a more complete and diverse musical instrument in Rowlands' history, the new Phantom extends the legacy of Rowland

workstation

s to an unprecedented level, so whether you're creating music at home, in your home studio, with or without da W or yourself. If you're performing and controlling playback tracks in front of thousands of people, the Phantom is the perfect choice for you, so you really need to go check it out at your local Guitar Center or take it easy to Guitar Center.