Roland AIRA Compact T-8 J-6 E-4, S1 and bears - oh my!

[O1B]

A bit short my fail… MIDI sync cable duties.
Thanks again, Dave!

oooooooooh curly ones

Yes. It’ll scatter Pre or Post, as will Reverb/FX.
Voice mangling is only Pre.. .. kinda the point of …

pity the mic port isn’t Stereo.
Aira Scooper may have to join the chain….

I might have missed this, but can the E4 scatter live input without recording it as a loop first? I remember Roland's old eurorack scatter module needed to record the input before affecting the sound.

[exper]

Yes. It’ll scatter Pre or Post, as will Reverb/FX.
Voice mangling is only Pre.. .. kinda the point of …

pity the mic port isn’t Stereo.
Aira Scooper may have to join the chain….

I might have missed this, but can the E4 scatter live input without recording it as a loop first? I remember Roland's old eurorack scatter module needed to record the input before affecting the sound.

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying that. Still might be fun to put stuff through it in mono. Stereo in would have been awesome.

[O1B]

. It is awesome in mono… very.
I usually hate random scatter … usually… here…
Scatter w Verb, synced…

Drums… vocals…. Mix….Dub..

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying that. Still might be fun to put stuff through it in mono. Stereo in would have been awesome.

[O1B]

J6 in Stock… one left!

https://reverb.com/item/56844483-roland ... ynthesizer

[mome rath]

http://soundcloud.com/sex_trout/m-0-n-d ... al_sharing

T8 and monomachine
love this little feller

[Mr_Sulcus]

I noticed today that the Kick Drum pattern on the T8 does not randomize. I found this really helpful for jamming random patterns without losing the flow, but I'm not sure if this is intentional or if I've mangled a setting...I can't find mention of it in the manual. Anyone else's work differently?

[GNSDG]

The Manual SUCKS!!!!
Is there a way to internally lock the tempo to something other than 130.0 bpm.
The t8 and j6? Seem easy to do, but the e4….

How do you change the tempo at all, internally, from 130.0?

Did anyone figure this out? I also can’t see how to change BPM… and yes manual sucks. I have yet to successfully get the thing out of menu mode.

[GNSDG]

ALSO can anyone confirm these don’t let you record the mix in? Looks that way from signal flow chart and I couldn’t see an option to do so when connected to USB. I thought the boutiques generally allowed this though.

[Voltcontrol]

http://soundcloud.com/sex_trout/m-0-n-d ... al_sharing

T8 and monomachine
love this little feller

Damn, that's quite nice indeed!

[mome rath]

http://soundcloud.com/sex_trout/m-0-n-d ... al_sharing

T8 and monomachine
love this little feller

Damn, that's quite nice indeed!

thanks

[mome rath]

couple more



doesn't do particularly well at low rez on a square wave
but for $199, hey

[xdiplo]

I noticed today that the Kick Drum pattern on the T8 does not randomize. I found this really helpful for jamming random patterns without losing the flow, but I'm not sure if this is intentional or if I've mangled a setting...I can't find mention of it in the manual. Anyone else's work differently?

Yes, same here. i was a bit confused at first and thought i was doing a wrong process but as you said it's better like that.

[mome rath]

aaaaaaaaaaand another
used the internal overdrive, it's OK but I don't like how you have to access/control it

[u0421793]

If there’s any more planned, I’d like what amounts to a tiny MC-202 - as a lead synth. It’d have to have a few fewer synth controls than a 101 to fit the form factor, so I’m wondering what can be dispensed with or function-shifted. The sequencer side would be useful if it were a riff launcher / looper, so you could improvise riffs and motifs and combine them, repeat them and recall, or something like that which would be good for live performance.

[Mr_Sulcus]

Has anyone synced up the looper apart of the E4 to a Eurorack setup, using a trigger/clock to quantize the loops?

[Richard deHove]

No TRRS cable so I abused the mic input instead:

[Headphones73]

I have a TB03, I’m getting a TR08, and I’m not a singer or rapper, so only the J6 would interest me tbh. Just for all the Chord functions you might stumble into.

[rplktr]

I don't think it gets enough attention that those super-cheap instruments support USB audio. The E-4 in particular accepts audio input via USB which allows for lossless harmonizing/scattering of any audio from your DAW while staying in time with your software and accepting MIDI input to control the harmonizer. See example where USB audio in+out and USB MIDI are used fully:



Each of those three devices also has an AUDIO IN that bypasses internal processing (and even the main volume knob) and outputs audio as-is. This signal is included in the USB audio output, too.

This makes those little devices incredible deals for portable music creation. For example, imagine you have a standalone groovebox like the Polyend Play and you just want to record your stuff with your iPhone. If you add a Roland E-4, you get both a vocoder/harmonizer to your setup that you can sequence with Play, and a class-compliant audio interface for your iPhone where you can use the AUDIO IN jack on the E-4 to route Play's output to.

I'm really impressed how Roland managed to cut down those devices to their bare minimum so masterfully. They left out so much but managed to keep every feature that actually matters. Sure, I can easily imagine additional features I would like to have but somehow the existing combination of features is flexible enough not to feel crippling.

I'm in love with the E-4 in particular because it's the device that got me singing, something I wanted to do but was afraid of for literally years. Having the voice processor with auto-tuning, vocoding, and harmonizing allows me to hide behind those things while my vocals are imperfect. But the way to get the vocals to be better is to actually sing. The E-4 gave me that confidence to do it.

[mor4sso]

didnt see it mentioned here, so thought i'd share for those that are exploring these

picked up a t-8 with the intention of having a few of my favorite roland drum sounds in a small box that I could control and modulate with my octatrack.

none of the controls on the panel are tracked, so don't expect to change parameters over MIDI.

just something I took for granted before buying. still like the thing a lot and its totally worth the price. has a surprising amount of depth and sounds great, but a few little tweaks (saving under the hood settings on power down and tracking the controls) would have made it a slam dunk.

[rplktr]

saving under the hood settings on power down

Which ones aren't saved? On the E-4 power-cycling the device doesn't forget any settings. Knob and fader values are kept and MENU settings are kept.

[mor4sso]

saving under the hood settings on power down

Which ones aren't saved? On the E-4 power-cycling the device doesn't forget any settings. Knob and fader values are kept and MENU settings are kept.

you can adjust some of the instrument parameters under the hood on the T-8. (gain, overdrive, decay, tuning, snap, color, etc) but they don't save on power down afaik. :(

[rplktr]

Let Roland know, this sounds like an unintentional omission.

[Leviathant]

picked up a t-8 with the intention of having a few of my favorite roland drum sounds in a small box that I could control and modulate with my octatrack.

none of the controls on the panel are tracked, so don't expect to change parameters over MIDI.

just something I took for granted before buying. still like the thing a lot and its totally worth the price. has a surprising amount of depth and sounds great, but a few little tweaks (saving under the hood settings on power down and tracking the controls) would have made it a slam dunk.

Interesting! Thanks for the heads up. Considering people are still paying $150-$200 for a Boss DR-110, I'm astonished at how much bang for the buck a Roland T-8 gives you. I've got a Tempest and a TR-08 and I still feel the draw of the T-8.

[anselmi]

Is there a way to set an exact bpm tempo on the E4 without using external sync?

[rplktr]

Is there a way to set an exact bpm tempo on the E4 without using external sync?

This is actually a good question and I was also puzzled that there is no option to do that explicitly. It turns out that if there is no external clock, E-4 automatically figures out the tempo after you recorded the first loop. The loop duration determines the tempo. This is somewhat problematic because that means you cannot use scatter effects in your first loop. Or if you're not interested in the looper at all, you still need to record a dummy loop to set the tempo.

Fortunately, in practice, a MIDI clock is never really far away in my case, and I can always use eurorack or a Pocket Operator or my Circuit Mono Station for DIN clock. But it's a weird omission, indeed.

Here's another piece with E-4, this time with nothing else. Just the harmonizer controlled with Launchpad Pro. This was a little annoying to record because the harmonizer allows up to 4 notes and if you press a fifth note... the previous 4 just stop. So you need to be really careful about this, the effect is otherwise pretty jarring. What makes matters worse is that if you lift all your fingers, the harmonizer returns to the default interval set with [HARMONY] + [FORMANT]. This might be an interval far away from what you are playing and so also pretty jarring. What I ended up learning to circumvent this is to either hold the lowest chord note when switching to a different one, or to take a breath while changing the chord.

Obviously, this is not a problem at all when you sequence the harmonies via MIDI. This is only a problem for live performance a'la Imogen Heap. And I'm not even talking magic gauntlets