Over the past few years, Roland has been busy crafting compact, portable synths, vocoders and drum machines. The AIRA Compact series offers an ideal solution for creatives on the move, and Roland has just unveiled its latest addition to the series.

An uber-portable creative sampler, the AIRA Compact P-6 is meek enough to fit into your pocket, the piece of gear can easily be brought on the road or in between home and the studio. It’s even battery-powered, meaning you charge it up and use it anywhere without worrying about a power source.

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The AIRA Compact P-6 boasts eight banks of six pads, meaning you can load it up with 48 unique samples.

Roland has also ensured the AIRA P-6 has a mass of live sampling capabilities thank to the built-in mic, making it simple to capture sounds from the world around you – or you can import wav samples directly onto the sampler.

The gear is also kitted with a slew of features to tweak and customise your samples. Pitch-shifting is of course standard, but there’s also a resampling and granular synthesis engine within the AIRA P-6 – you heard that right, granular synthesis from Roland!

Each sample can be looped, reversed, and even be played with an alternate loop. You can also manipulate your samples with reverb and delay, and there’s also a multi-FX processor. The processor will allow you to choose between lo-fi, scatter, resonator, vinyl simulator effects and more.

The step sequencer also boasts 64 steps in total and a memory of a maximum of 64 patterns. Users can experiment and tweak the velocity, length, sub-steps, probability, micro-timing, off-grid sequencing and motion recording.

If you’re eager to get your hands on this portable sampler, it’s currently available for $219 in the US.

More info can be found via Roland.

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