Roland’s Introducing Three Tiny Music Makers That Put a Portable Studio in Your Pocket

You can write, file, edit, combine, and publish a music utilizing nothing however a set of apps in your smartphone, however musicians, even these producing digital music, like bodily devices with buttons and knobs they’ll fiddle and carry out with. Roland’s new AIRA Compact line is a trio of miniaturized music makers, and whereas not as small as a smartphone, they nonetheless handle to squeeze bodily controls into a really moveable bundle.

Similar to Teenage Engineering’s inexpensive Pocket Operators and Korg’s pricier Volca lineup, Roland’s AIRA Compact gadgets are designed to be moveable devices you virtually all the time have available when musical inspiration strikes, even whereas out and about. Unlike basic gadgets just like the Roland 808 drum machine, the AIRA Compact items aren’t true analog digital devices that depend on parts like resistors and capacitors to make sounds, however as an alternative use the digital Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) that Roland developed for its bigger AIRA and Boutique machines. Leveraging the facility of contemporary processors, they reproduce comparable sounds to basic analog machines and provide the identical stage of tweaking and manipulation, however via digital means.

The AIRA Compact line at the moment consists of three choices: the T-8 Beat Machine, the J-6 Chord Synthesizer, and the E-4 Voice Tweaker. The former options sounds from basic Roland devices together with the TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, and TB-303 drum machines. Meanwhile, the J-6 Chord Synthesizer relies on Roland’s JUNO-60 synth. Finally, the E-4 Voice Tweaker comes with a microphone jack that enables vocal samples to be enhanced, pitch corrected, effected, and, sure, even used to create neat robotic voices. Each unit can be utilized individually, linked to a PC or different devices with a USB cable for use as a MIDI machine, or linked collectively, with a important unit permitting linked headphones to watch the sound from all three.

T-8 Beat Machine

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Professional musicians can justify the price of filling studio racks with basic Roland choices just like the TR-808 and its predecessors, however these simply dabbling in music making ought to discover greater than sufficient of an outlet for his or her creativity with the six-track (plus a bass line too) T-8 Beat Machine drum sequencer. The sounds in its built-in library could be custom-made utilizing filters like delay, reverb, and decay, and as much as 64 patterns with 32 steps every could be created and triggered on the fly throughout a efficiency.

J-6 Chord Synthesizer

Also catering to beginner musicians, the J-6 Chord Synthesizer already has 100 chord units pre-programmed and built-in so customers don’t need to create and file their very own, which might truly be somewhat tough utilizing that tiny eight-key keyboard. Chord customization choices embody filter and envelope management knobs, delay and reverb results, and easy + and – octave pads for making pitch changes.

E-4 Voice Tweaker

Part experimental toy and half vocally-driven instrument, the E-4 Voice Tweaker does precisely that with a microphone linked to its line-in port. (The lack of XLR enter and phantom energy is somewhat disappointing for these with entry to professional-grade mics who’d reasonably not have to achieve for adapters.) Voice results embody pitch-shifting and auto-tune, harmonies, reverb, a vocoder (for making robotic sounds), formant changes, and even a Roland-developed impact referred to as Scatter which slices up and stutters audio playback, managed in real-time utilizing a devoted knob.

All three AIRA Compact items can be found beginning as we speak for $200 every.