ROLI BLOCKS LIGHTPAD BLOCK £170, LIVE BLOCK £70, LOOP BLOCK £70
London-based musical instrument maker ROLI made waves a while back with its Seaboard piano, a radical, 21st century keyboard with pressure sensitive keys that let players perform pitch bends and slides, allowing for string instrument-like expression.
They’ve now devised this new pocket-sized modular music making system, which aims to open up music production to beginners as well as being a useful mobile sketch pad for more experienced players.
At the heart of the system is the Lightpad Block – a lightweight, touch-sensitive, glowing grid of squares. Once synced up via bluetooth to ROLI’s free but currently iOS-only NOISE app, the Lightpad can be used to create melody lines, arpeggios, drum beats and bass lines, as well as act as a sequencer for building compositions.
The pressure-sensitive surface area essentially works as a midi controller triggering sounds and loops from your
STAR RATINGS iPad or iPhone. The device adapts to which of the 128 instruments you have selected, meaning it can operate like a drum machine, or as a gridbased keyboard that can be set to certain scale, ensuring you won’t hit a duff note. The surface also responds to gestures. Playing a note and sliding your finger left or right will alter its pitch, while moving up and down can increase effects like phasing or echo. You can extend the control surface with additional Lightpad Blocks, while two smaller snap-on devices give access to playback and recording controls (the Loop Block) and instrument, scales and tempo controls (the Live Block) in hardware form. In practice, I found the Lightpad Block a little difficult to get on with and the playing surface isn’t as responsive as you’d expect, and while the available sounds are great, you’re limited to what ROLI provide. Also, you only get four tracks on which to sequence songs – one for drums and three for synths and bass lines. It can be inspirational, but there are plenty of mobile apps that offer a lot of what the Light Pad does, with a better playing experience.
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