This is going to be an exhaustive and comprehensive niggly review of the Roland FA 06 keyboard. It's based on its use in a recording setup making my 8th studio album for a progressive rock band, plus a European tour with that band where I used it onstage as both instrument and main sound device for a complete computer driven system. However it is going to be a review made from the point of view of a traditional electronic Keyboards player - not a DJ or contemporary tech player and I DO indeed feel a bit embittered by the provison of new toys AT THE EXPENSE of basic functions - I love new toys but feel that I am over provided with sampler pads today and could use some more pots instead.
I have a great deal of good stuff to say about it, and some severe criticisms. There will doubtless be criticisms that are based on my own ignorance of how to do something. If you have solutions to problems I highlight in the review, please feel free to let me know them. If you only want the outcome... here it is without having to read the rest.
If you tried to take it away, I would attack you, quite viciously. This device /instrument is like nothing I could even have dreamed of when I was younger. It is an Organ, it is a synthesiser, it's a piano, it can record music, it can play back music, you can compose on it, perform on it, you can use it as a vocoder, as a sound card, a controller, a sampler (of sorts) and with a computer you can record a whole arrangement on it of nearly any kind of music you can imagine with - lifelike instruments of nearly every type from every major grouping of instruments from percussion to the human voice itself. You could set it up in the loo and write and record AND master the theme tune for "Game Of Thrones" and then play some Lounge Jazz. It is, when seen through the eyes of the 17 year old boy from 1976, an unbelievable miracle. However, the late middle aged bloke from 2014 has seen a few miracles in his time and this review is forced to take those other miracles into account. The music workstation first came into my life in 1994 (I was a late adopter) and I've seen a few. This is undoubtedly the best I have owned, and if I dwell a lot on the negative points it's to reinforce the need for all keyboards manfacturers to listen more to musicians and build them the kit they need, and to listen to DJs and build them the kit they need, not try to unite the two with a poor compromise. Because I believe that this astonishing feat of electronic engineering is seriously flawed and could do with a rethink.
Right.. that said, nothing's perfect but we can hope for perfection and hope that the designers and builders of these things will listen to us and use us as some kind of beta testers for the model 2.
Befor ewe continue we must remember that as of April 2014, Roland NO LONGER MAKE the Fantom series and they call the FA synths "Their Flagship Workstation"
THE CASE
The FA-06 is a lightweight compact workstation that is truly portable and practical for a gigging musican providing he/she doesn't drop it because it's pretty flimsy. Every part of the case is plastic, no metal or wood anywhere in sight. That's why it's light enough to comply with even Ryanair's weight restrictions. It's very black. It's also mind bogglingly cheap for what it is.
THE KEYBOARD (FA-06 ONLY)
The keys are short. Paying no attention to the way we have learned our instruments over the years, Roland have seen fit to shorten the length of a key and not tell us in any of the advertising bumph that they have done this. They did this once before on the Juno G and probably others. It DOES affect playing but it is not impossible. I personally find the fact that the keys are not as long as they should be responsible for occasionally tripping over the ends of black notes which would not ordinarily be there and I occasionally stub my longest finger against the fall bar. This worries me because I actually have unusually small hands... There are no official standards about key length. Sadly, there should be, and there should be rules that non standard key sizes must be declared in bumph!
THE CONTROL PANEL
The Control panel is in a gloss finish. This means that under stage lighting it is very difficult to see as you are dazzled by reflections... for this reason my FA -06 will not be on the top rack of my system. A gloss finish control panel is something I haven't met in a long long time... there's a reason for that. I've just stated it... and someone obviously forgot this. The LETTERING is in silver and is exceptionally difficult to read in shadows and high intensity light. The illuminated pads totally disappear under strong while light. Better memorize everything. I shall be covering the whole control panel with Matt black PVC with White text overlays.
The MANUAL
is useless really - the VK7 manual for a straight Drawbar organ was thicker and more detailed , and this has a large chapter about how to put the thing on a stand (duh!) but NOTHING about how to play user samples with the keyboard instead of the pads.... You can get a fair amount of info from it, but the minute you wanna do something complex it lets you down. For example - the internal 3 oscillator synthesiser has dozens of parameters and the MANUAL allocates just ONE column of ONE page to the operation of that.. no "instructions" are given - just a screenshot (with no caption or explanation of what you are even looking at), a table of grouped functions, a flow diagram and a three line explanation of "a partial". The complexity of this function requires a manual of its own.. it's fine for an experienced operator, but a newbie would just use presets... shame. A separate "Parameter Guide" is also available,, this does Help, but all it is is a list and a basic explanation of each function with not a great deal of "how to do it".
THE SOUNDS
Switch the thing on and have a play. The sounds are fantastic really. The strong suit of this device. The Supernatural Pianos (ghastly name) guitars, basses, drums are wonderful, responsive, the keyboard (despite the length of keys) controls them well as a decent spring action thing... good velocity curves for my playing although when it comes to solo piano it's time to connect a weighted job....
Some of the pianos are gobsmacking (including the electric pianos).. rich, mellow, bright, thundering with great sustain properties and excellent resonance. Acoustic basses that actually interpret slurred notes as bends, clunk and thud - fantastic. Acoustic guitars that kind of strum when you play a chord and like the basses interpret motions as slides. Wonderul orchestral sounds, gooey pads, lots of variety - no mellotron. Daft Buggers. There are great surprises like the most realistic harmonica you ever ever heard (but probably don't need) and some of the most unrealistic flutes since a Sound Canvas. The device still has a section of GM sounds which can loosely be described as POO and I wonder if the fact that the sounds are always POO is somewhere written into the GM spec. No-one will use them.
THE ORGAN
A complete Drawbar Organ simulator can be brought up on the tiny screen, and fiddled with - drawbars can be changed (the screen is NOT touch sensitive) with up/down buttons. IF you are a organ specialist beware.. although this thing is useful it's not a patch on VB3 or even the old B4 simulators. The rotary speaker simulators are very EQ colouring and the controls for speed are at default levels ridiculously slow at slow speed, over fast at fast speed and with a huge acceleration time like a very rusty old leslie. Changing them is fiddly and time consuming. Keyclick is OK but not great... percussion the same. leslie overdrive is horrid. I abandoned organs after 2 days of trying to match the sound to a Hammond organ i have downstairs. It didn't come close. The VB3 DOES come staggeringly close..... just in case you were gonna say "well it wouldn't"
ON THE OTHER HAND -
The organs are the best I have heard from any all-in-one workstation device. Miles better thant the Fantoms, Junos, Motifs etc... far more real and intuitive. But VB3 trounces it. Pianos are up there with Alicia's Keys and have good editable decisions.
SYNTHESISER - What SYNTHESISER?
The FA 06 and 08 have a section called Supernatural Synthesiser. This is of course a contradiction in terms, but lets not get too pedantic. Strangely enough,the words SEQUENCER, ARP/RHYTHM, SAMPLER all appear in capital letters on the front panel, and the word SYNTHESISER does not. How odd, because the synth section is really good. Although it requires a whole load of peering at a tiny screen that should be touch responsive and selecting virtual pots and pushing them up and down with increment buttons, it's actually quite good... essentially a 3 oscillator synth with VCF, VCA, ADSR, EG etc. NOISE is available as an alternative to using one of the oscillators... rather than being a separate source. Waves include the standard set of Saw, Triangle, Sine, Square and Pulse and as well as this you can use one of the huge library of PCM tones instead of the oscillators... There's a RING MOD switch (haven't had time yet) and I haven't managed to do Oscillator sync yet, although those sounds are not in my usual repertoire so I won't be exploring that too far. Anyways, if you have an hour and very good eyesight you can build up a really great sound that you could have got in 10 seconds on a Minimoog. But it IS yours to keep for ever and ever....
SAMPLER
the SAMPLER section is one of the machine's biggest (but not THE biggest ) rip-offs. This sampler is very very poor. Not at making samples which it does as well as any iPhone, but the way it implements them. It's essentially designed to work with the PADS as some kind of hybrid DJ tool for spinning samples and beats into a piece. To ME this is NOT what is meant by a sampler. When something sells itself to me as a "Sampler" I'm expecting a device where I can build up a composite sample of, say, a Mellotron, map the samples to the keys, use effects on them, use them as sounds within other patches etc. FORGET THAT. The machine is able to load in four banks of 16 samples which are crudely editable and loopable, but they are NOT mappable, therefore my mellotron requires one sample for every note, no stretching or mapping is provided. This is more primitive than Roland's own MKS 100 which was released in the late 80s. The manual totally fails to adequately explain how you get the keys to play the samples, but forums have let me know that there is a switch in a pretty unlikely menu (STUDIO SET COMMON - GENERAL - PAD PART SELECT). Whichever part you select then features the samples you put into memory starting at bottom C - note 36 and moving up a semitone for each subsequent sample. The note you want to appear on note 36 MUST be in Sample bank ONE - slot (PAD) ONE. Can't be anywhere else. The samples are only SAVED as part of a SONG - and as one full keyboard of an organ would use all the sample memory slots (if not all the memory) therefore you would only be able to have one full sampled instrument in memory at any one time. There is no function to save my four banks of sixteen as asingle file called Mellotron - just a "song". Silly. I had a toy Casio thing that could sample and implement samples better than this. For DJ work, these pads might be great as sample triggers, but this is NOT a comprehensive proper sampler. It's a toy.
THE AFTERTOUCH SCAM
The BIGGEST RIP OFF OF ALL, which is a product of supreme arrogance at Roland is AFTERTOUCH. Not everyone is a user, but for me, Aftertouch is a wonderful device that allows me to control the speed of Leslies, vibrato, volume, cutoff frequency and other parameters without having to take my hands off the keyboard. It's invention was potentially the greatest development of the keyboard instrument since Bob Moog attached a synthesiser to one. The FIRST thing I do when checking out a new keyboard is to download the manual and check the MIDI Spec chart at the end. And in the FA manuals it shows that AFTERTOUCH is transmitted and recieved on ALL channels. Hence I decided to buy the thing. And prebooked mine as I needed it for an up-coming tour. The manual was typically vague about aftertouch, but did mention it a lot in my initial reads. When it arrived though, I couldn't work out how to switch it ON!!! A few letters to varous forums later, the truth dawned on me. This keybed does NOT have Aftertouch at all - it has a fricking KNOB that transmits the AFTERTOUCH command!!!!! Which means I have to take my hands off the keyboard (getting more annoyed) which means that IT'S NOT FRICKING AFTER TOUCH THEN, IS IT???? That's the whole blooming point. This is like saying that your hotel room has a hot tap and cold tap. But you need to go to the village pump if you want water because the TAPS AREN'T CONNECTED to anything!!!
So just in case anyone is out there wondering THERE IS NO AFTERTOUCH on a Roland FA 06 even though it says there IS in the manual. VERY very poor do!! A few Fanboys have scolded me for expecting too much on an 800 quid keyboard. I have Full incremental aftertouch on an EMU Xboard which cost 150. Nonsense. I'd have paid more anyway. I need it!!! I think the way they incorporate mentions of aftertouch into the manual is snide, misleading and verges on dishonesty. Apologies are due.
The INTERNAL SOUND STRUCTURE
is next on my hit list. Like most workstations going back as far as the SY85 and maybe even M1, there is a setting where 16 sounds can be used as a "MULTI MODE" as Yamaha used to call it, and "STUDIO SET" as Roland are currently referring to it. I use this function more or less all the time. To compare this with the Yamaha SY85 (1994) - the quality of the sounds is a lot better... we've already dealt with that. The FA has also addressed to biggest problem of such devices in that effects built for each individual patch ceased to function properly when incorporated into Performance-Studio Set mode. Roland have nailed this completely, so if your Rhodes has a leslie effect on it as a standalone patch, it will still be there in the Studio Set. Hurrah! About time! But it's as though Roland have totally forgotten what we might actually want to USE these studio sets FOR!! You see, each sound in the studio set has a "keyboard" in the video display (a bit like mainstage) in which you can set zones, limits and stuff to build up a composite sound. But ONLY ONE composite sound. Because the key limits etc only work if a little button (called the Keyboard button) is illuminated on the part. So the ones where it's illuminated can be used to build up really quite marvellous composites. To explain the problem, lets say I have a Piano/Bass Split on the FA. It sounds great. No problem. BUT if my dumb controller keyboard just above it wants to play another sound that is split - like for example a velocity sensitive brass pad that becomes a STAB when I hit it harder - well this can't be done. Well... not easily without having to pre program a PCM tone specifically for this purpose. In order to get around this, I'm having to do all my zoning with the dreaded laptop which I just can't seem to get rid of... The "keyboard button" is either ON or OFF, when it's off you CAN play those channels, but the note limitations do not apply and you get a whole keyboard full of Bass and Piano, no split! How hard can this have been to program properly? maybe an upgrade... probably not!
ON THE OTHER HAND,,,,
The studio set architecture can do some surprisingly good stuff too. For example, I;ve built up a huge composite where an acoustic jazz bass and brushes kit can be played in the left hand, and a huge combination of SELECTABLE different instruments can be played in the right. this is by using the pads in Keyboard Switch on/off mode. So I can start off with a piano "trio", add some vibes a few bars later, bring in a Hammoind for the chorus, fade it out using the expression pedal on a long chord, replace it with a Rhodes, enable the strings and fade them in with the expression pedal, switch in a distorted clav on the left hand, switch off the acoustic bass and replce it with an electric thumper - all as part of one, real, live performance that requires no backing track at all. It's quite certainly the best device at doing this I've ever played, and is worth the ticket price alone. Superb, in the extreme.
THE PEDALS.
Roland seem to have a dreadful FEAR on my behalf. That I may run out of notes... Therefore, in this and previous workstations they have built a safety feature which cannot be switched off, unless you know otherwise. There are THREE pedal inputs, all of which suffer from the same thing.
So here's a little scenario which illustrates the problem. Lets say I play a really nice motion strings pad, hold the pedal down and sustain it indefinitely. Lovely. Now, i can switch to another part and play a nice soft synth lead over it. Very nice. Trouble is, this can't be done.. (it can but not by the FA on its own) Roland have made the machine so as soon as you select another part (using the pads in part select mode) the sustain you applied to the strings pad is cancelled!!!! Ludicrous! Even when connected as master to another keyboard, the FA transmits a PEDAL OFF command via midi the second you change part! Similarly, lets say you are using an organ sound and have used the expression pedal to turn it down... you flick to another part while holding down a chord on the organ.... and the FA kindly transmits an Expression command of 127, promptly bouncing the organ up to full volume!!! And I can't find a bypass in the OS for this! The manual doesn't even mention it. I have developed workarounds for BOTH these pedal problems, the first being to use the pedals from another keyboard beciuse these resets are only generated if the original command was from the FAs own ports. Using the FA as a slave, if I'm playing a hammond sound and using a pedal to cotrol leslie speed, if I change the FA's patch, then the leslie reverts to slow speed!!. These mandatory resets are spoiling the experience and are really unnecessary but could at the very least be optional. Remember they are ACTIVE off commands.. someone has programmed them to do it, and they aren't needed and are obstructive in more complex systems.
THE SEQUENCER.....
Well... it's not gonna be a thing for me... onstage I'm a live musician with no backing tracks. At home I have a dedicated Cubase 7 system with a super processor and terrabytes of disk space and 2 massive hi res monitors. I'm not really gonna want to peer at a 4 inch wide screen to do my sequencing. Occasionally in the past I have used some inbuilt sequencer to cobble an idea together while "on the road" but now I have a laptop to do that with... not worth the eyestrain to use this. Also, for some reason, Roland decided not to let you record Audio on this thing which is odd because you could on the Juno G machine a few years back and that was a lower order of life financially. There is a frig you can do where you record your audio as samples and fly them into your sequence - but that's like going back to the very first PC programs like Samplitude and Procyon where you had a sampler that played in time with a midi sequencer... unreliable at best.
DAW Control...
Roland have made great play of this in their bumph. It's at best, a nice little extra. Well, this is useful onstage for sorting a couple of things out without having to turn 90 degrees to my left, but it's not exactly amazing stuff. In my studio I find all remote control devices to be a hinderance, however simple or complex, I can always work faster with the keyboard and mouse of the computer. In my many years of experience with DAWS, (Steinberg Pro-24 is where I came in) the more you try to make them like old school recording interfaces, the slower it all gets. Sure, you can get 8 pads on the FA to do 8 different functions on the computer. Whoopee. 8. You need to program up what those 8 buttons do, you think "fantastic" and then you just carry on using the keyboard key commands and the mouse 'cos it's faster and you don't have to remember what you programmed into those 8 options and in what order. Why we need fast forward and fast rewind buttons eludes me.... there's no TAPE!!! Just GO to the place you wanna go from! So you can program 8 "GOTO" functions into the FA pads... but what happens when you write songs with 12 sections in?
ERGONOMICS
Lastly, the golden area on the control panel where both hands have easiest access to (i.e the middle) is occupied by a TV screen that we don't need to touch all that much. I know it looks right to have a screen in the middle, but those Part Change Pads are a long way across for my left hand to reach when my right hand is busy playing the keyboard! Please please please put vital controls in the middle and eyecandy to the sides... that's to all keyboards designers.
SUMMARY
To sum up - hard to think this, but this is a wonderful machine that suffers from HUGE problems caused by the desire to produce something that both Trad Musicians and DJs want. Many manufacturers are pandering to this market. (not Clavia though) The truth is that Musicians need total control of their performances, this is sadly lacking here. The sampler is a toy for spinning samples into the mix and is royally trounced by specialised DJ gear to start with. The controls are fiddly, irritating and very screen reliant, and the screen is very small. Real Aftertouch is a glaring omission and a badly exercised con... The case is flimsy, the controls are hard to see, the text is silver and nigh on illegible without moving your head, the pedals system is badly and deliberately compromised, the Studio Set architecture is badly flawed and inflexible in some ways, amazingly versatile in others. The keys are the wrong length. For me the most important controls are on the extreme right of the keyboard and the hand I want to use them with is inconveniently located on the left hand side of my body. For all my complaining though, I have never, ever, ever had a device that CAN do so much, can sound so good and weigh as much as three bags of sugar.
If I had my money back in my account, and the keyboard was still in the shop, knowing now what I know, this keyboard is so good that I would have to get on the bus, buy it again and have all the joys of getting irritated by how close to perfect it is, to come again.
If anyone has any doubts.. it is worth every penny you pay for it and represents the most wonderful clash of design and practicality you are ever likely to meet. It has more power per currency unit than any other keyboard I've tried in a 40 year long journey. Buy one now.
Statistics: Posted by progferbrains — 11:29, 3 July 2014