ROLI’s Equator 2 isn’t just the software interface for your Seaboard or MPE instrument, it’s also a deep and versatile sound design suite in its own right, with a stable of incredible sounds ready to be intricately explored.
Most of the sounds contained within Equator have been tailor-made for five-dimensional control. The best way of demonstrating their potential is to call up an instrumental emulation, and explore how to navigate its sound in a more realistic way with your controller.
Built around three main tabs – Synth, Routing and Effects, Equator 2 invites you to create fresh sounds, firstly by adding up to six different oscillators within the Synth tab, each of which able to operate as a Wavetable, Granular, Noise or Sampler.
Custom made wavetables can be dragged and dropped within the Wavetable dropdown for each oscillator, while in the Routing page we can direct each of our six oscillators and filters to a range of different locations.
In the effects page we can chain up to 12 effects, including EQ, Phaser, Reverb, Distortion and more to personalise and evolve our sound. Speaking of which…
The centre of Equator 2’s UI displays the modulation sources for whichever controller you have connected. MPE controllers allow you to assign modulators to any one of the five directions of movement available easily. Once you’ve got the hang of it, Equator 2 might just be your new favourite synth.
