Roland Gaia 2 marks a ‘tricky second album’ moment for the series of synths£769 (street price), roland.com
The Roland Gaia SH-01, discontinued earlier this year, is a synth that’s easy and fun to use, making it ideal for newcomers, yet packs enough synthesis power to make it popular amongst experienced sound designers too. The new incarnation, Gaia 2, has much in common with its predecessor, but also a lot that sets it apart, and not always for the better.

READ MORE: Black Corporation’s ISE-NIN shoots for Jupiter – and lands lavishly

Zen and the art of synth modelling
Gaia 2 is the latest in Roland’s series of ZEN-Core instruments, joining the likes of Jupiter-X, Juno-X and the flagship Fantom series. ZEN-Core itself is the software platform in which most of Roland’s current synth designs run and, as well as powering hardware instruments like Gaia 2, it lies at the heart of many Roland Cloud software offerings too.
A practical and positive upshot of this is that ZEN-Core instruments can load models of other synths. In the case of Gaia 2 this means, alongside the new model developed for the instrument, Roland has pre-installed a free SH-101 model, and you can add additional Roland classics via purchasable Model Expansions.
Roland GAIA 2 in use
The Gaia 2 synth model is quite similar to the original Gaia SH-01, but with a number of welcome additions. The original’s single virtual-analogue oscillator has been doubled-up and a new wavetable oscillator added. This comes with 64 varied wavetables, each containing 128 waveforms, but unfortunately cannot load custom wavetables. What it can do, however, is apply wavetable folding – conceptually similar to adjusting the pulse width of a square wave – which Roland calls Phase Modulation (or P-Mod). It also sports a built-in waveshaper (Shape Mod / S-Mod in Rolandese), ideal for enhancing the harmonic content of the source waveforms.
The filter section has also been updated, and now offers low-, band- and high-pass filtering at 12, 18 or 24dB/octave, as well as a drive stage to add extra bite. The filter can self-oscillate and has a pleasing if inoffensive character, but if you need additional filters the enhanced effects section contains a variety of different types that can be applied as needed.
Modulation capabilities have been improved slightly with the addition of a second LFO, but it remains the case that neither the amp’s nor the filter’s ADSR envelope can be used as a modulation source; the only envelope that can be applied to varied destinations is the so-called Oscillator Envelope, but this is only a basic two-stage AD affair.
Roland GAIA 2 virtual analogue oscillator
Sounds and presets
Gaia 2’s three oscillator (virtual) architecture is not groundbreaking – many synths use a very similar set-up – but it does provide a rich toolset for sound design. The freebie SH-101 model adds a whole extra palette of sounds and sound design possibilities on top of this, but this isn’t a review of the SH-101 so ‘nuff said about that!
A total of 256 read-only factory presets are included, arranged into four groups of eight banks, each containing eight presets. The User storage area extends this by a further four groups for a total of 512 slots, some of which have been pre-populated by Roland. Roland’s habit of grouping patches in eights has its roots in early preset-capable synths, but in the 21st Century it’s bordering on the obtuse, and is needlessly awkward to work with via MIDI.
There are some very nice presets here, although we felt there were too many that were either too elaborate or too old fashioned to be particularly useful. Also, the effects section contains a pleasing new reverb processor, but Roland has tried too hard to make us aware of it, turning otherwise good sounds to mush with the amount of ‘verb they’ve been drenched in. Don’t get us wrong, the sound design is good, and the sound quality is outstanding, but we found too few presets that inspired musical ideas, and too many that elicited a “meh… Next” response.
Roland GAIA 2 informative display
Portmanteau pad
At the centre of Gaia 2’s panel sits an X-Y touchpad that serves a variety of purposes. Roland has given this touchpad an exceptionally silly name, a portmanteau of “motion” and “emotional”, that we can’t bring ourselves to use. We will therefore refer to it as the Portmanteau pad.
The Portmanteau pad, then, makes up for Gaia 2’s dearth of routable envelope generators by allowing a pattern of movement to be recorded and used as a modulation source, this pattern being stored with the patch. Patterns can be enabled or disabled at the touch of a button, and the pad can also be quickly switched to directly control the wavetable oscillator’s P-Mod or S-Mod values, useful during both performance and sound design.
Unlike most touchpads, which have a smooth and silky feel, this particular pad has a rough texture. This doesn’t feel the greatest when whisking your finger across it, and is likely to get quite grotty over time as dirt and grease get embedded in its texturing.
Roland GAIA 2 touchpad
Side games
From around the mid-80s, Roland (and most other synth manufacturers) included in their instruments a side game called Menu Dive. In this game the player was tasked with using a small LCD display and awkwardly-arranged buttons to navigate a fiendish maze in search of a special prize, namely the ability to adjust the desired synth parameter. This side game never made it into Gaia SH-01 (replaced by an exciting key combination guessing game), but Menu Dive is back in Gaia 2. Yippee.
Despite Gaia 2’s plethora of hands-on controls, almost every area of the synth features important parameters that can only be accessed via a game of Menu Dive. The game has been simplified somewhat thanks to Gaia 2’s monochrome OLED display, and it now has two ways to play: either twiddle and press the Value knob, or stroke and tap the Portmanteau pad, but we feel gameplay would have been improved infinitely had Roland just given Gaia 2 a touch sensitive display.
When not playing Menu Dive, the display shows a variety of information about the currently-loaded sound. Preset name and number occupy the upper area, whilst the lower area is taken up with an animation of any Portmanteau pad movement stored in the preset, alongside a real-time waveform display. We found the flickery animations to be hugely distracting, and largely useless given the display’s low resolution, so it’s good that the animated elements can be disabled. This then only leaves the screensaver to distract you when it kicks in!
Roland GAIA 2 connected to tablet
Design and build
The aluminium panel that houses all of Gaia 2’s controls looks smart and solid, but sits somewhat incongruously with the cheaper- and weaker-feeling underside of the enclosure. The rotary controls feel solid and move smoothly, although switch-style knobs are simply regular knobs with detents and so don’t feel very switch-like. The faders, used for amplitude and filter envelopes, aren’t as nice and aren’t even consistent. Some are a bit scratchy whilst others are very scratchy.
Gaia 2’s four-octave, full-size-key keyboard is an improvement on the original, with a firm, high-quality feel and response. Sadly, it lacks aftertouch sensitivity, and we experienced hanging notes quite often, especially when playing fast passages. This is almost certainly a software-related issue, so expect it to be fixed in a future firmware update.
In place of the classic Roland pitch-and-modwheel-joystick-combo-thing, Gaia 2 has separate pitch and modulation wheels. But these wheels are tiny, and consequently have too small a throw to allow detailed control. Frankly they’re a joke, and completely unacceptable on something that costs the best part of £800.
Another joke is the so-called manual, a collection of flow charts, tables, labels, arrows, and gaudy, migraine-inducing colours that take far more brain power to tease information from than would a conventional written tome. Whatever fever-dream inspired this dog’s dinner, we hope Roland realises it just doesn’t work and publishes a proper manual without delay.
Connection to Roland Cloud Connect with GAIA 2
Mixed bag
We thought we’d love the Gaia 2 – indeed we wanted to love it – because on paper it ticks all the boxes. Versatile, high-quality sound engine? Check! Hands-on control? Check! Large palette of sounds? Check! Ability to load entirely different synth models? Check! Granted, the synth’s (virtual) architecture is little different to that used by countless other synths, but there’s a good reason for this; it’s a very capable architecture!
However, what we’re looking at here – let’s face it – is a software instrument and control surface. Nearly £800 is a lot to fork out for this if you already have a computer whilst, for live performers, we’re not convinced that the synth is tough enough for life on the road. More to the point, this asking price places Gaia 2 into a bracket where we expect to find less jank and more polish.
Key features

4-octave keyboard and extensive hands-on control
Wavetable oscillator with 64 wavetables containing 128 waveforms each
Wavetable waveforms shapeable via Phase Mod and Shape Mod
2 virtual analogue oscillators with X-Mod, Ring Mod and Oscillator Sync
Multi-mode filter with low-, band- and high-pass modes at 12, 18 or 24 dB/octave
Dedicated amp and filter ADSR envelopes
2 LFOs
High quality multi-effects
Zen-Core engine can load Model Expansions
Comes with free SH-101 Model Expansion

The post Roland Gaia 2 marks a ‘tricky second album’ moment for the series of synths appeared first on MusicTech.

ROLI’s Seaboard RISE 2: seamless integration into the expressive world of MPE [REVIEW]
ROLI – the company behind the original Seaboard, which came out over 14 years ago and then the Seaboard RISE more than 8 years ago – has returned with the Seaboard RISE 2. Today, we’re diving into our experience testing it out, and how it stands out in the space of MPE controllers. What is the […]
The post ROLI’s Seaboard RISE 2: seamless integration into the expressive world of MPE [REVIEW] appeared first on DJ TechTools.

Blast’s marketing approach “cheapens the work of a serious team” — ParadigmParadigm, one of Blast’s seed investors, criticized the protocol’s decision to launch a bridge before its L-2 and withdraw capability.

Live Review: Drew HolcombThe Greek Theater   Los Angeles, CA

Web: drewholcomb.com

Contact: danielle@stuntcompany.com

Players: Drew Holcomb, guitar, vocals; Rich Brinsfield, bass; Nathan Duggar, guitar;

Jonathon Wamble, drums

Material: Drew Holcomb is a country singer hailing from Memphis, TN who's crooning country tunes to his audience’s content. The songs are very country. Just shy of rock & roll, on one end, and just shy of traditional country on the other. Holcomb brings out the best in his band as he sits nicely in themiddle watching and listening to his audience soak up all of his lyrics; and even sing along to a few of the tunes, too.

Musicianship: What can you say about Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors except that they sounded tight. Great musicianship encompassed Holcomb on all the tunes as these top-notch players had their way with the audience. Brinsfield and Wamble were on point as the rhythm section held the bottom end ever so groovily. Duggar added sweetness to the mix, as he doubled on guitar and pedal-steel guitar and was outstanding throughout the evening.

Performance: Excellent. Drew came out swinging from the get-go and didn’t let up all night. The band had the audience dancing in the aisles and singing along to “Dancing with Everybody” and All the Money.” Drew and the Neighbors played flawlessly to 6,000 plus fans and had them all eating out of his hand by the time the set was over.

Summary: Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors have been making music for the better part of 20 years and are still going strong. The ballads, “Song of Gratitude” and “What Would I do Without You,” sum up what’s been in Holcomb’s heart this whole time—gratitude and love. Their very first No. 1 hit, “Find Your People,” from the Strangers No More album, shook the charts in 2023 and the band hit the road in support of the record. If you’re a country music fan (and even if you’re not), Drew Holcomb is worth checking out! 

Samples From Mars Mirage From Mars Acoustic instruments Transformed Through the Classic, Lo-Fi Sampler The Mirage is an 8-bit sampler from the mid 1980s featuring eight voices of polyphony, an analog Curtis CEM3328... Read More

Waves Silk Vocal Silk Vocal takes your vocals from raw to pro—in no time. Using innovating technology to intelligently process EQ and dynamics, the plugin helps you achieve balanced, well-mixed vocals... Read More

Reflections on Web Summit: Out of the frying pan, and out of the fire?“What controversy?” said the journalist from a global mainstream television outlet to me at the Web Summit Media Dinner, earlier this month in Lisbon. For all the heat and light, the gnashing of teeth, the tearing of clothes and the clutching of pearls, the big technology conference had seemingly managed to pull itself out of […]
© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Spitfire Audio’s Black Friday Sale Spitfire Audio are celebrating their 15th year with the launch of their largest Black Friday Sale event to date, offering savings of up to 75% on selected products.

Sam Altman returns to OpenAI, Apple adopts RCS, and Binance’s CEO pleads guilty to chargesHey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular recap of the past few days in tech. The headlines have been dominated — nay, overwhelmed — by the drama unfolding at AI startup OpenAI, but plenty else happened in the half-week leading up to Thanksgiving. So much for a sleepy pre-holiday! In this edition […]
© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Binance onboarded millions into finance but forgot the paperwork — Columbia professorBinance settlement highlights banks’ and crypto firms’ ambiguous treatment, says Columbia Business School adjunct professor Omid Malekan.

Out Take: Eric Foster WhiteMusician/Producer/Screenwriter

Web: linkedin.com/in/ericfosterwhite

Contact: Mike Jones, mjones@shorefire.com

Most Recent: MusicClubKids

Eric Foster White credits his alma mater, the University of Miami, for drastically raising the bar for his musical standards and setting him on the path to becoming the Grammy-nominated songwriter, producer, musician and screenwriter he is today. A trombone player who once toured with Frank Sinatra, Foster White traded the horn for a career in producing and songwriting after his demo recordings led to a contract with Jive Records. He then went on to write several hit records for the likes of Whitney Houston, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.

These days, White is working on MusicClubKids!, a YouTube musical show for kids in which White—with the permission of the original artists and songwriters—has transformed some of the day’s biggest pop hits into kid-friendly songs and narratives. The idea sprang from a car ride with his three-year-old niece. 

“Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ came on the radio, her mom clicked it off because of the lyrics, and my niece was perturbed, because she loves that song,” he says. On the spot, White came up with the idea for the more age-appropriate “I’m in Love with My Doggy”—an adaptation of Sheeran’s song.

“It’s like Weird Al-meets-KIDZ BOP,” White says. “And we don’t want to denigrate the original artists’ songs; the idea is just to introduce these pop songs to the next generation.” MusicClubKids! has just released a holiday album, which adapts OneRepublic’s “Runaway” to the new “Holidays,” and Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits” into “Ask Santa.” White says that industry opportunities are actually better for aspiring songwriters today. 

“Music is less a monoculture; there are more niche markets and niche styles,” he says. “It’s still competitive, but now there are lots of other artists, maybe of lesser stature, that you can start out writing for."

5 tips for recording sample packs from Kaelin Ellis (free template included)
Multi-platinum music producer and educator Kaelin Ellis shares five tips for recording high-quality sample packs.

Lofi Oddity Is A Free Lo-Fi Sound Mangler VST Plugin By AberrantDSP
AberrantDSP releases Lofi Oddity, a free lo-fi sound mangler VST plugin. This one is a fun one, for sure. I love the stuff AberrantDSP puts out. Their SketchCassette plugin is one of my absolute favorites for hitting the vibe and grunge of an old cassette deck (another recommendation is our new free BPB Dirty VHS [...]
View post: Lofi Oddity Is A Free Lo-Fi Sound Mangler VST Plugin By AberrantDSP

Spektralisk Elements: Sonic Ingredients Lifetime free updates! Buy once, and receive future content without additional costs. Learn more at https://spektralisk.com/products/elements Sonic Ingredients... Read More

RELEASE DETAILS
Release title:
Bulletproof Fish
Main artist name:
Pleco Nation
Release date:
2nd Dec, 2023
https://publme.lnk.to/BulletproofFish
#newmusic #Release #Music #indepedent #artist #hiphop #trap