To those who have been turning a blind eye to ROLI because of their pricey hardware, the time has come to take them very, very seriously as software synth developers. Equator2 is nothing short of astonishing.
No one can deny that ROLI have played an important role in the spread of MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) since rolling out the Seaboard in 2014. While this new style of expressive synthesis and sampling has been embraced by many, the question surrounding ROLI products has always been the same: “Am I going to have to pay £750 to get a MIDI keyboard that controls a soft synth?” This is the price of the cheapest fully equipped Seaboard, the RISE 25. There is also a Seaboard Block for close to £300, but it is significantly smaller in size and comes without the handy expression controls found in the RISE models.
Instead of traditional oscillators, Equator2 has four sound engines – a wavetable oscillator, a sampler, a granular sampler and a noise oscillator. With a total of six sound engine slots, this is four more than its six-year-old predecessor, Equator 1. The sampled synths include a Roland System 100, Roland SH-2, Sequential Pro-One, Oberheim OB-Xa, Korg MS-20, and ARP Solina among others. The other categories of samples are mainly comprised of multi-sampled instruments with dozens of different articulations. The wavetable and granular sound engines’ expanded views are also comprehensive, with internal controls like ring modulation, wavetable morphing, internal FM and unison.
With Equator2 we can confidently say that it’s time to focus on the software. The synth combines sampling, granular synthesis, instrument modelling and wavetable synthesis while offering 1300 of the best-sounding presets on the market. And no, you don’t need an expensive MPE controller to make the most of it.
Read the full review over at Attack Magazine.
