Artificial Tunes

The Sampler

The many demos I watched on YouTube, there were mentions of the FA-06 having an SP-404 sampler built into it. I am not familiar with the SP-404, but if it is lacking in features like the FA-06’s sampler, then it’s not worth the price. This is the capability of the FA-06’s sampler:

1. Record a sound from either the FA-06, an outside source, or both. You have the option of triggering the recording within a threshold of sound.

2. Trim the sound. Give it a name. Set it to loop or not and whether it plays in it’s entirety or the length of the press of the pad (or key if the track on sequencer is selected). The pads are not velocity sensitive, the keys are.

3. You got 64 slots (4 banks x 16 pads) to repeat 1 and 2.

That’s it. Really. No time stretching. No pitch shifting. When you sample something, be sure to name it with the key and bpm it was recorded in. A 120bpm bass line in the key of D isn’t going to work in a 122bpm song in the key of E on the FA-06.

My big gripe with it is that it is missing the ability to set the length of the recording. This is really important in order to get a perfect tempo-aligned loop. It’s also really hard to get a loop that has tails that wrap around like how the Korg Kaossilator samples its loops. This makes the loop feature on the FA-06 also useless unless you import loops from somewhere else that *can* make good seamless loops.

Also sequencing loops in the FA-06’s tracks only triggers the start of the sample. That means if you have a 4 bar sample playing, and start the sequence at, say, bar 2, you won’t hear the sample until the MIDI triggers it again. Good luck editing something complicated with that.

The Sequencer

The biggest place this falls apart is the display. It will only show a recording based by bars. What’s in those bars? You’ll have to stop the sequencer to find out, and use “Microscope” to see a overly complex breakdown of every MIDI event on that track. Sure, Microscope has a piano-roll type display, but it’s an ugly one. The sequencer itself can only view 8 bars at a time, even “zoomed” in. But zoomed in should have at least give a thumbnail view of the MIDI notes. A song composed on the FA-06 will look like a long block of dashes. Good luck trying to determine how bars 12-16 are different from bars 32-36 and what happens when you clumsily try to cut and paste bars with clicky buttons that are arranged awkwardly.

The FA-06 was clearly made to sketch out a few bars quickly, and take it somewhere else to finish the job. Not exactly what $1200 should buy.

I also hate how the record/play buttons operate. Once in record mode, you stay in record mode (and it’s rehearsal mode) until you press stop. You can’t switch to “play” or vice versa. It’s frustrating and it pulls me out of moment.

The Main Control Area

This includes the display, jog wheel, and the control buttons. Whoever thought that dark grey or red words on a glossy black surface was great in even moderately low light conditions, should have their heads examined. The fact that this went through Roland’s entire company without one executive going “This is awful” is really telling. Another thing that really sucks in low light conditions is having Enter, Exit, and Shift buttons all the exact same size right next to each other. I’ve made a quick fix for this by cutting out some colored electrical tape and placing a green and red rectangle under Enter and Exit, respectively. I might add some brighter labels later on. The preset buttons would all but vanish on a dark stage.

Presets, Studio Sets, and Songs

Roland touts 2000 presets, but realistically, there are presets that are duplicated with only tiny parameter changes, this is particularly true in the synths section.

I’m not a fan on how the FA-06 organizes it’s sound. Even with sub categories, scrolling is long. I haven’t found a way to see only my user presets. I’ve yet to set up my “favorites” shortcuts, which allows me 100 slots of either Presets or Studio Sets.

Studio sets serve a dual roll of having stacked sounds (Combinations in Korg lingo) and a way to keep a group of 16 tracks for sequencing. Sounds great in theory, but there is no way of saving a Studio Set and Song at the same time, which means you have to save the Studio Set and then Song every time you want to save your progress. A “Save Both” would have worked great here.

Also split and stacked sounds are saved as studio sets presets in FA-06, but are sort of hard to bring into existing user Studio Sets, which makes it hard to deal with. It makes it even more difficult when trying to set up stacked/split sounds in a DAW, since each sound is it’s own track but are “merged” by the keyboard’s software. I’d rather the splits and stacks be saved as simple presets but visually take up sequencer slots when importing into a Studio Set. It all seems awkward.

Something else I hate: a sound can only have one effect assigned to it. Good luck trying to have a flange and delay on one sound, like I can on my MicroKorgXL. Luckily, chorus and reverb are treated like inserts and each Studio Set has a master “Total Effect”, but come on, only one effect per instrument??

Which brings me to another problem (there seems to be so many now that I’m writing this down): Samples loaded into the pads are not stored in the studio set, they are stored in the song folder. This seems stupid and ass-backwards. If anything, it would be great to have the samples stored as a preset, to be brought into a Studio Set like any other instrument. Only slightly worse would be to have it saved as part of the Studio Set itself, making the sampler a useful thing to have as part of a template.

“DAW Control” Button

Last night I finally hooked up my FA-06 to my laptop and Ableton Live. From the YouTube demos, I knew that the FA-06 can transmit 16 tracks of MIDI and 2 channels of audio (stereo). They call this an audio interface which seems really impressive until you realize that 16 channels of MIDI going to only stereo audio is sorta limiting. Ableton would have to be set up with 16 external instrument tracks that get bounced to a single audio track, or each track would have to be solo’d to freeze the audio to the track. I still haven’t figure it out, mostly because...

The FA-06 doesn’t jive with Ableton. Pressing the DAW Control button on the FA-06 brings up a menu (an ugly menu that you have to look at while in DAW mode) that gives you options between Sonar, Cubase, and Logic — and “User”. The problem is, “User” gives you absolutely no Transport controls. It allows you to set the six knobs (Ableton favors an 8-knob set-up), the two switches above the pitch-wheel, and - get this - only 8 of the sixteen non-velocity pads. You don’t even get the full 16. Bastards. I’m not even sure if the foot switches will work right.

And I’m running the audio back out of the FA-06 headphone jack, which is producing a doubling effect on the playing sounds, even with the Local switch “off”. I’ll have to try plugging my headphones into my laptop instead.

Wrapping Up

I’m really bummed. Instruments like these are supposed to lift up the user in order to create music, not stick them in the mud with (unnecessary) obstacles. I wonder if the Korg Krome would have been a better choice, even with the crappy key bed. I don’t see a way of me ever knowing. I’m stuck with the FA-06. Part of it was a present, and I don’t know if I can return it and get something less disappointing? Roland is supposed to be a top tier music giant. Is this the quality of their products? The FA-06 has been out since 2014, almost 2 years. They are probably not going to fix or enhance the software with an update. Next month in NAMM they are probably going to unveil a newer model. The Demo guys are probably going to gloss over it’s short comings as well.

Dammit.