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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Roland's V-Synth XT soft synth certainly looks like it means business with its ‘Roo-Bar’ handles on the front and the dominant colour screen centre stage. What’s more, the angled casing means it’s as at home on the desktop or mother keyboard top as it is in the rack, and as you get to understand how much of a performance piece this is it’s never likely to sit more than an arm’s length away.

There are three good reasons why so: firstly the colour screen is touch sensitive and more or less all programming can be done in this way rather than with laborious cursors and value knobs. And it’s response time is excellent, virtually no time-lag at all. Secondly, there are eight real-time performance knobs assigned to eight different parameters: assignments are freely changeable, but it’s very clear from the screen which parameters are linked to which knob. And thirdly, you'll just want to program it, which is a rare thing to say about a complex modern synth: many new offerings rarely get tested beyond the army of presets but this is so well structured, intuitive and accessible you'll immediately want to ‘go in’.

There are a couple of other reasons why you just have to play with this thing: the control pads. On the original V-Synth there’s the Time Trip Pad, a control feature that emulates a record deck, whereby you get to ‘play’ a sampled VariPhrase loop like you would scratch a deck. Better still, the VariPhrase loop needn’t go up and down in pitch as the scratch speed changes.

On the XT this has sensibly been moved on to the screen to save space and the idea has been expanded with a Matrix Control Pad, a more simple X-Y matrix, like the Korg Kaoss pad: two parameters are assigned to the X and Y matrices and these can be played by sliding your finger up and down, across or around. Patches are saved with pad assignments for quick recall and performance.

Cash issues

If you still don’t get why you should part with £1,500 when you’ve got a computer full of softies, here’s further encouragement: audio inputs. To get the most out of the XT these should be attached at all times. There’s a pair of line inputs on the rear that can be plumbed to a pair of outputs from your desk or audio interface, and on the front panel there’s a combi-connector for an XLR mic input (with phantom power), line input or high impedance instrument input. There are three entirely different things you can do with the audio sources once they’re attached: processing, sampling and vocoding.

Plug your guitar directly into the XT, set up a patch to use the external input as the oscillator source and the vast array of synthesis and effects processing is at your fingertips. The XT can be treated almost like a pedal board or a multi-effects processor, except that you still have to be sending it a MIDI note for it to make a sound -- you’d have thought that could have been sorted by now.