Connection and battery-wise, the mobile music studio can last for up to 10 hours of battery life and comes with 15-meter Bluetooth range so the users can wirelessly connect to devices even if they are slightly far from them. Aspiring electronic musicians can also play around with the ROLI Studio, a software accompanying the MiDi controller, where they can choose from 400 distintinctive sounds and presets for their production. The software also offers Drums which creates its own drum beats with around 15 drum kits, each with 16 distinct and controllable parts.

of free space required for ROLI Connect, ROLI Dashboard and ROLI Studio. 13GB required for Equator2 installation. 3GB required for Ableton Live Lite installation. Let’s move on to the Studio Drums application. This presents itself as a simpler‑looking cousin of the Studio Player. There’s a selection of preset kits, each containing 16 sounds on a traditional four‑by‑four grid. A generous selection of individual parts is provided, any of which can be swapped onto any of the grid pads. Despite its compact size, this instrument enables infinite musical discovery, allowing users to play any sound imaginable and express themselves with unprecedented freedom. With 10 hours of wireless battery, they can play and perform on the Seaboard wherever and whenever inspiration strikes.

Advanced customization of keywave response through a firmware upgrade, offering more nuanced MPE control. Although Noise is fun, it’s not very deep or intuitive so you’ll definitely want to connect to Equator Player on Mac (a stripped-down version of Roli’s excellent MPE-optimised desktop Equator sound engine) or control your favourite plugins/software apps instead. You’ll need some kind of Seaboard if you want to explore all of the sonic performance options that MPE-based instruments offer, and this is the cheapest. If you just want to play regular synths, you can make do with a regular keyboard, but these things do push a boundary in sound well worth exploring. ROLI have taken their forward-thinking multitouch technology and applied it to an imaginative modular control system. With these dimensions, sounds can be warped, pitched, and moulded in pretty much any way you like; and these sounds come from either the Equator soft synth, which runs as a regular plug-in, the ROLI Noise app (one that runs on iOS via Bluetooth, if you wish) or any compatible soft synth. By ‘compatible’, we mean that it has to respond to these extra dimensions via MIDI, so has to be MPE (Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression) compatible.

Switch between your saved Equator2 or ROLI Studio presets by holding the side button and pressing the octave left and right buttons. RISE, for the uninitiated, is a keyboard like no other. It features Keywaves, which replace standard keyboard keys. You get 12 per octave as on a regular keyboard and you can even play them like a regular keyboard – but you’d be missing out on a few extra dimensions, because what makes RISE stand out is the way you play it. With ‘Five Dimensions Of Touch’ you can Strike, Glide, Slide, Press and Lift keys, adding several new layers to your playing and performing. ROLI Connect provides access to the FXpansion MPE‑capable instruments (though you have to go online to buy them): Strobe2, Cypher2 and the brand‑new Equator2. However, we’ll concentrate on the bundled Studio Player and Studio Drums. Both of these will run standalone or as VST (2 and 3) plug‑ins.

Seaboard Block key features

Equator Player has become part of ROLI Studio Player, with new features like Smart Chords and a multi-layered Arpeggiator, as well as combining the Strobe2 and Cypher2 Players into one, unified plugin. Think of ROLI Studio Player as the next generation of the older Players!

Yes – the Octave Switch buttons double as preset switches. Simply hold the Mode button and press the lower or upper Octave Switch button. No, only LUMI Keys is compatible with the LUMI Music App. — I’m a professional musician / influencer and I’d love to make content for you. How can I submit a partnership / collaboration proposal? It does take quite a bit of getting used to, especially to get your pressure right, but there is nothing glaring in an "I wish this was this way" kinda way. Its 24 keywaves are smaller – about 80% the size of the RISE's – so the playing experience is a little different (see keywave surface comparison above). Playing chords and melodies on the Lightpad is much like playing on the Push, or any other grid-style keyboard, with an important difference: sliding a finger left or right to another pad will pitch-bend the current note by default, and in ‘hide notes’ mode, consecutive pads can be between one and four semitones apart. Sliding a finger up or down modulates the current note but doesn’t change its pitch. (I found this disconcerting since I’m used to doing vertical glissandos across pads on the Push.)The ROLI Studio software suite is a comprehensive platform for creative potential, offering inspirational features such as Smart Chords, Multi-Layered Arpeggio, and Macros, all specifically tailored to enhance musical output and production. ROLI Studio Player provides a curated selection of 400 distinctive sounds and presets sourced from ROLI’s powerful sound engines. Rather impressively, both the chord generation and arpeggiation are indicated not only in Studio Player’s keyboard display, but also on the LUMI itself, flashing up pink keys for the chords and yellow for the arpeggios, against blue highlights showing the chosen scale. Until and unless everyone buys a LUMI and this effect becomes old hat, it would look pretty impressive on stage.