![]() The semi-weighted action is one of the quicker and more silky I"ve played recently, but Fantom users are not wrong to point out there"s a bit of a 'thunk' factor as it bottoms out. Street priced have dropped about $300 since its introduction in mid-2019, and are currently $2,999 $3,299 and $3,699 for the Fantoms 6, 7, and 8, respectively. My review unit, by the way, is the mid-sized model, the Fantom-7. (Expecting we"ll be hearing from brother Ed Diaz more than once!) As always, questions and comments are welcome on this thread and if I don"t have the answer to something, I"ll find us someone who does. This first post just provides my first impressions on a number of the Fantom"s features â we"ll get deeper into each area as time goes on. The big question is, does the Fantom do enough different tasks well enough that it can stand in for multiple other instruments that are all desirable in their own right? Over the next few weeks in this GearLab, that"s what we"re going to try to find out. Onboard sequencing and composing takes a page from real-time, clip-oriented DAWs such as Ableton Live, and is intended to get you from idea to finished track without needing to click a mouse. The new Fantom is also a museum of legacy Roland sounds from such workhorses as the Integra-7, which in turn included a warehouse of legacy sounds from XV- and JV-series Roland synths before it. Like 'SuperNatural' before it, this is more of a marketing term than a technical one, but it should be known that ZenCore supersedes and encompasses SuperNatural. ![]() There are a bevy of new sounds using what Roland calls its 'ZenCore' engine. ![]() There"s an entire V-Piano engine built in, based on Roland"s modeling-based digital piano. Below that is a row of jolly, candy-like buttons (old Ren & Stimpy reference for my Gen-Xers) to select categories of single instrument sounds, called Tones in Roland parlance. There is even a real analog filter as well as modeled filters. Yes, you have the obligatory knobs-and-faders bank as on any modern workstation, but then over on the right there"s a dedicated synth section with dedicated controls for filters, envelopes, you know ⦠all the fun stuff. What immediately grabbed my attention about it â other than what I think is one of the cooler industrial designs I"ve seen on a keyboard in recent years â was the sheer amount of real-time control. So, it"s intriguing to see Roland advance the new Fantom, a keyboard workstation that"s a proud generalist. The hardware boom of recent years, however, has favored specialist instruments from analog synths to drawbar organs to Eurorack. Once upon a time, and seemingly yesterday to myself and I"m sure a lot of folks on these forums, the do-it-all synth workstation was king of the keyboards.
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