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• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

New sounds

One criticism levelled at the original V-Synth was its poor preset spread, and this has been wholly re-addressed by Roland, who've got in a variety of producers and sound designers (including the likes of Richard Barbieri, Crystal Method and Tatsuya Nishiwaki) to create a huge selection of patches -- 512 in all. These do a good job of showing off the diversity of the instrument covering musical styles from ambient to hardcore. This is an instrument for the adventurer. It doesn't do the ordinary, so there are no strings or guitar sounds in earshot.

Roland have always been good at warmth compared to other well-known synth makers -- they do a good fat bottom end -- and though they might always sound good in solo sometimes their sounds don't cut through in a mix. The general V-Synth sound has the toughness and edge to do that as well as the low frequency warmth.

The arpeggio feature is comprehensive and with the edgy sounds there's some really good driving sequences. There's always something to prick up your ears. And it's so easy to tweak sounds on the XT that a preset need only be the start point.

The V-Synth is essentially a softsynth in its own hardware container and with that come some of the drawbacks of computers -- it did crash a couple of times during testing and it did stop playing for no particular reason occasionally, but on the whole it was quite well behaved and feels stable.

Conclusion

In a world where the softsynth is king, it's hard to see how one could justify shelling out for a dedicated hardware synth, but were you to spend time with the V-Synth XT you'd come away thinking differently. Why so? Back to our three good reasons: one, it's a joy to work with, from the ultra-responsive colour touchscreen and the eight performance knobs through to the intuitive program layout. Two: it sounds good: big, warm, hard and edgy, it's all there and it works within a busy mix. And three: the audio inputs for either sampling waves for the PCM oscillator or for using the extensive processing on any audio track, such as a guitar, make it much more than just your everyday synth.

It's only 24-voice, which is a limitation if you want to run several parts, but then the XT is really all about performance. With so many real-time controls, such as the in-screen Time Trip pad, it's just asking to be played.