The Motional Pad is nice, the horrible title apart. It looks as if a little bit of a gimmick at first — a big X/Y touchpad, not not like the Korg Kaoss Pad, devoted to modulation. However when you get previous the preliminary strangeness (and Roland’s manufacturing facility patches that lean onerous into its gimmicky aspect), it’s onerous to not see the worth. It’s used to manage the waveshaping and section modulation of oscillator one, however you too can assign virtually any parameter you need to the X and Y axis and alter them by merely dragging your finger round.
What’s extra, you may file that movement, basically providing you with a 3rd, advanced LFO. It information not simply the form of your finger actions, however the timing too. So you would draw small circles slowly working your means from the underside left to the highest proper, to open up the filter and improve the resonance earlier than rapidly zigzagging your means again to the beginning. Most of the manufacturing facility presets deal with this animated modulation sequence as a novelty, sketching out small individuals, leaves and, after all, the Roland emblem.
Terrence O’Brien / Engadget
Sound engine
This clearly isn’t a deal breaker, however it does communicate to a broader challenge I’ve with the Gaia 2: lots of the presets really feel like tech demos and I don’t discover them significantly usable. Now, I can already hear individuals getting up in arms. “Effectively, an actual musician can be designing all their very own patches from scratch anyway!” you is perhaps saying. I’m right here to inform you to go kick rocks. There’s no disgrace in enjoying presets, particularly for those who’re making music as a pastime. Moreover, the manufacturing facility presets ought to be a showcase of what a synth is able to, not simply technically, however musically. And judging by that, the Gaia 2 is firmly caught within the early aughts.
That is finally what left me feeling chilly concerning the Gaia 2: It sounds dated. The unique Gaia was a strictly digital analog affair. Its successor stored the identical three oscillator construction, however swapped in a wavetable engine for considered one of them (the opposite two stay digital analog). There are many nice, modern-sounding synthesizers on the market that use wavetables, however Gaia 2 makes a speciality of a specific model of Roland cheese. It’s excellent for scoring a flip of the century cyber thriller, and whereas some individuals will find it irresistible, others gained’t.
The 2 digital analog oscillators sound medical and lack oomph within the decrease registers. The filter is extraordinarily versatile with three totally different slope choices (-12dB/Oct, -18dB/Oct or -24dB/Oct) for every of its three modes (lowpass, bandpass and highpass) and a drive possibility. It may well sound a contact skinny, however it’s serviceable.
Terrence O’Brien / Engadget
I want I might say I used to be extra enamored with the sound engine, as a result of in any other case that is in all probability essentially the most pleasurable fashionable Roland synth I’ve used. The Gaia 2 strikes a near-perfect steadiness between complexity and approachability. The three oscillators, multimode filter, twin LFOs, Motional Pad and wealthy results part provide fairly a little bit of depth, however are extremely simple to dial in. All the pieces is labeled clearly and the entire most important parameters have direct hands-on controls. Even most issues that require shift features or some menu diving are all fairly intuitive. It’s legitimately enjoyable to program. The Gaia 2 would make a wonderful instrument to study synthesis on if it wasn’t so costly.
Making use of the LFO to any parameter is so simple as holding a button and turning the knob of no matter you need to modulate. And there’s even a step mode the place you may design a 16-step customized wave. The Motional Pad and glorious sequencer are a cinch to make use of. And having faders as a substitute of knobs for the 2 envelopes (amp and filter) is a pleasant contact. There’s no modulation matrix and you may’t reroute the envelopes, however I didn’t thoughts a lot. I hardly ever ran right into a state of affairs the place I actually wished to do one thing when designing a patch, however couldn’t. It’s an easy synth with sufficient depth to maintain even skilled gamers twiddling knobs for hours.
Terrence O’Brien / Engadget
Mannequin Expansions
When you develop bored of the primary Gaia engine, you may load Mannequin Expansions so as to add emulations of traditional Roland synths just like the Jupiter-8 or Juno-106. It even comes with an SH-101 emulation pre-installed. Actually, that sounds higher than the default digital analog engine.
In fact, the mannequin expansions aren’t low cost at $149. And loading them on the Gaia is, let’s say, aggravating. You could have two choices: You should purchase an optionally available $100 wireless USB adapter and ship them out of your cellphone. Or, you may copy information to a USB key after which load them manually from there. (You realize, identical to it’s 2001.) This is likely one of the few locations the place Roland stays stubbornly archaic. Though the Gaia 2 has a USB-C port able to transmitting each audio and MIDI (and energy), it could’t connect with the Roland Cloud supervisor app to load Mannequin Expansions.