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You can do pretty much everything with a Fantom-G.

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Launched at the 2008 Winter NAMM show,  the ‘G’ series Fantom arrives in three forms - G6 (61 keys), G7 (76) and G8 (88). The largest of these features Roland’s extremely impressive ‘Ivory’ keyboard response.

With this release, the Fantom has been improved both internally and externally, with the most obvious improvement being evident before you even switch the machine on. The Fantom-X introduced Roland’s colour screen, but this has been expanded up to a whopping 8.5-inch TFT display on the ‘G’ series and, the moment you do boot up, the benefits are clear.

This display positively sparkles. The increased resolution means that more information can be shown clearly at a smaller size, which means that the display bristles with data. Initially, this might be a touch overwhelming - Roland’s desire to keep you updated with as many parameters at once adds up to a packed interface - but you soon get used to it.

To give you an example, the default screen, displaying parameters in Live Mode, provides the names of all eight active parts, with a graphical display of the key ranges over which they play. You can also see graphical representations of the eight new sliders (of which more in a moment), as well as numerical values for these, plus status displays for the four rotary dials, two assignable switches, pitchbend and mod wheels, and the function button title displays.

Roland’s clever colour-coding and layout give everything sufficient room, so you’re soon navigating like an expert, either via the arrow keys, rotary dial and function keys, or via a USB mouse, which can be connected on the back panel.

Any self-respecting workstation that offers multi-layered parts and mixing in the sequencer section needs the immediacy of sliders, so it’s with a sigh of relief that we greet the arrival of eight new ones on the new Fantom. They lie below the four assignable dials to the screen’s left and have a nice smooth action.

There’s a momentary pause before a slider realises you’ve given it a nudge and its position in the display adjusts, but this wasn’t a problem in mix sessions.

Sounds

Under the hood, there are plenty of developments too. For starters, the Wave ROM has been expanded to 256MB, which is twice that of its predecessor. This translates to a sound engine that boasts 230 individual waveforms and getting on for 2000 internal sounds, including the General MIDI banks.

The new onboard samples are taken from the SRX expansion board series but, more importantly, also feature brand new waveforms. The internal sample capacity is unchanged from the Fantom-X, with 32MB of memory as standard, which is expandable up to 544MB if you choose to fill the spare DIMM slot with extra RAM.

Initially, we found this limited standard provision frustrating and thought Roland had been a bit stingy but we can, to an extent, understand the logic. RAM is cheap, so if you do want to dramatically expand, it won’t break the bank to do so. There are also lots of potential Fantom-G users who won’t touch the sampling capabilities (though they should!) as they have this base covered somewhere else, so we can understand why Roland would keep this basic level on the low side. However, 64MB would have represented a better compromise in our opinion.