Roland’s all-in-one workstation, Fantom, already known for its expressive performance has been updated to version 2.0 making it even easier for producers, players and composers.
The Fantom family was already packed to the gills with a huge variety of sounds thanks to the Zen-Core and V-Piano sound engines, but in recent firmware upgrades, it’s also been treated to new SuperNatural Acoustic Zen-Core Expansions, presented in 24bit/48KHz resolution for the first time. The SuperNatural engine combines samples with behaviour modelling technology to deliver accurate representations of physical instruments like strings, solo brass and woodwind, as well as choir sounds.
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On top of this, you can also make use of Fantom’s 16 virtual expansion slots allowing you to access and download sounds from Roland Cloud, which includes EZX packs based on classic Roland SRX expansion boards, additional SuperNatural expansions of Acoustic and Electric piano, as well as over 50 Zen-Core sound expansion packs.
Version 2.0 features
If that’s not enough for you, Roland has thrown even more functionality at the Fantom range in the latest update. Version 2.0 now includes multisampling, allowing you to sample directly to the Fantom keyboard to create your own sampled instruments, or build multi-samples by combining many samples at once within a tone with up to 4 layers of velocity.
The Microscope features for the sequencer affords you the ability to fine-tune individual notes and use the touchscreen interface to draw and edit automation in the piano roll.
There is also the new TFX Total Effects option, which allows you to place any of the 90 high-quality DSP effects at your disposal across the entire master output, input channels and multi-channels.
Other improvements in Version 2.0 include increased aftertouch sensitivity, new output routing, advanced scene chaining and zone control, as well as new display settings.
The art of Zen
As the Fantom series is part of the Zen-Core family of products, users can create and share sounds with other instruments in the range such as the Jupiter-X/Xm, MC-707/101, Ax-Edge, RD-88, Zenology and Zenology Pro.
Fantom’s Zen-Core engine can create powerful and complex patches. Each tone comprises four partials, each utilising an oscillator, multimode filter, amplifier, dual step-LFOs, and Matrix modulation routing. Combine up to 16 tones within a scene, each with their choice of MFX from 90 different effects including classics like Juno-106 Chorus.
If you want to find out more about the Fantom 6, 7 and 8 models, head over to the Roland website.
