For Fantom S88 Owners!!

[jacksmash]

Hi, I have a couple of questions about the Fantom S88. YES, I have done my reading up on it, on this forum as well.
The other day I went to a local music dealer to try one out. To be honest, I wasn't very impressed. I didn't really like the sensitivity of the keys, and I wasn't too impressed with a lot of the sounds.
Now mind you, I really didn't know what I was doing, so I can't really make a fair judgement.
After deciding that I would never buy one, I got a package in the mail from Roland. It was a DVD which gave a preview of the Fantom S88. I was COMPLETELY blown away. I couldn't believe how powerful it was.

So here are my questions that I would like your opinions on:

1) Is it easy to get a hold of CD-ROMS which contains other patches which are much better? For example, I would like to get an orchestral CD-ROM, but I'm wondering if the sounds are much improved over what is already on board?? I would also look into getting more guitar/bass sounds as well.

2) Is the Fantom really as flexible as they make it appear?

3) How well does work as a controller? If I were to buy a rack in the future, would I have any problems?

4) Is there anything you could tell me that I should watch out for?

Thanks for answering any of these questions.. and for those of you that have put up with my numberless questions already, I appreciate your patience. But after seeing the DVD on this thing, I realized I will not buy anything until I can afford some type of workstation - and this one seems to be the best price wise anyways.

Thanks again!!

[Drusillus]

I can't really answer your questions because I haven't got my Fantom-S (yet!) but in my opinion the Fantom-S is a great synth, and with the recent announcement of the upcoming Fantom-X series, the F-S is going for a really great price.

1) The easiest route to expanding your patch set on the F-S is with Roland's SRX series of expansion cards. In fact there is a very nice orchestral expansion card that many consider to be one of the best on any synth, rivalling many orchestral sample CDs.

Roland also recently released a free patch pack for the F-S containing over 1000 of the most popular patches from the older Fantom, XP and JV lines.

Also remember that since the F-S has sampling capabilities, you can expand your sound set with any of the commercially available sample CDs available (e.g. Spectrasonics).

As always, don't just judge a synth on its presets. Many will agree with me that presets (especially on Roland gear) sometimes don't really represent how good a synth can sound.

2) I have that same DVD that you refer to, and I would say that Yes it really is that flexible, probably even more so because that video doesn't even scratch the surface of patch programming.

3) It should work fine as a controller for rackmount gear, can't see any limitations in that area, it's a pretty universal thing.

4) Some people consider the 64-voice polyphony to be a limitation, but that will only really come into play if you do a lot of sequencing on it, playing back multiple tracks at once. For performance, it shouldn't be a problem.

On the surface it appears that it only supports WAV and AIFF files for samples, but there are several programs on the Internet to convert AKAI, Roland, and other sample formats into WAV. Plus Roland is going to be coming out with it's own sample conversion software (as part of the F-X release) that can be used with the Fantom-S as well.

For LOTS of information on the Fantom-S line, visit (one of my favorite web sites) http://www.fantom-s.info/.

[jacksmash]

Thanks for that great response!

[jacksmash]

Thanks for the great reply!

This helps a lot.

[wacho]

I compleatly agree with you francisco jeje the fantom is a great and powerfull tool and for the guys that are starting to get familiar with the synths and all that stuff it really is a easy to use board so i highly recomend it