Roland is well known for creating one of the best and stable keyboards and all in one workstations in the market for decades. The Fantom series is the ultimate piece of art among them. The Fantom series has been around in a few different incarnations for quite a few years now, and has become a staple in many project and professional studios as well as being an integral part of countless live rigs. Their new FA series is a departure from older Fantom designs, yet the “FA” part of the name alludes that at least some of the lineage has been preserved.
  
PROS 

• Fastest workstation ever: Load time 7 seconds
• Tons of Excellent sounds from Integra 7.
• Informative, easy-to-read display with bright, crisp graphics.
• Compatible with Roland Axial library. Included 4GB SD card. 
• Deep onboard sequencer can render multi-track audio stems for further work in your DAW. 
• Sampler pads for easy music creation. 
•  Inbuilt filters and dedicated mixer unit 

CONS 

•  Display is not a touchscreen.
• Sampler pads aren’t velocity sensitive. 

Panel Tour

Roland FA-06 keyboard is an unweighted 61-key synth action with velocity sensitivity. The action is surprisingly solid and responsive, but may not be the best choice if you’re planning on playing a lot of piano. If you’re in that category, Roland does make a weighted 88-key version, the FA-08.

On the surface, the FA’s interface appears more spartan than most of Roland’s previous workstations, but don’t be fooled—there’s a ton of power under the hood if you really dig in. Access to deeper editing functions can be achieved by holding down the Shift key and pushing another button, including the soft keys under the display to navigate the menus, many of which sport very cool and informative graphics. The main program section sports a large color LCD, which is navigated using parent/peer buttons to its right side, with values changed using a large edit dial or increment / decrement buttons. There are ten category selection buttons under the display, six of which (2–7) do dual duty as soft keys in many of the editing modes. While using all the buttons to navigate the display isn’t complicated, it sometimes can take more than a few button presses to get around, and the FA would certainly be a lot easier to navigate if it had a touchscreen—but that, of course, would increase the price. 

To the left of the display, six Sound Modify knobs handle four rows of commonly tweaked settings via a Select button that changes their assignment (more below), and an additional row of Keyboard Mode buttons cover transposition, octave shift, and quick split and dual modes. Plus the Split and Dual buttons simultaneously, and you activate what Roland calls a Studio Set, wherein any combination of the 16 available parts that are set to the same channel can be played simultaneously from the keys. The DAW Control button allows the FA’s to act as a control surface for Logic Pro, Sonar, and Cubase), which in conjunction with its USB Audio/MIDI interface capabilities, could make it suitable as the nerve center of your studio. Roland’s D-Beam is also onboard, with individual buttons that toggle it between dedicated volume control, a handful of assignable parameters, and a fun Solo Synth mode that generates noise bursts reminiscent of Keith Emerson roaming the stage with his ribbon controller.

On the other side of the display, another small array of buttons engage the arpeggio and chord memory (which can be used at the same time), and select the rhythm pattern control screen, with a small numeric display that indicates the current arpeggio/rhythm tempo—kudos to Roland for providing both a dedicated tempo knob and a tap tempo button here.  The remainder of the right side is taken up by the sequencer transport controls, and the backlit pads that provide access to the phrase sampler as well as being able to handle other tasks such as muting and soloing sequencer tracks and doing numeric keypad-like data entry. 

Sound Engine 

Under the hood is a 128-note polyphonic synth engine with full 16-channel capability. The onboard sound library is taken directly from Roland’s flagship Integra-7 module, and made up of the complete sound set of the XV-5080, all of the “SuperNatural” synth sounds, and a carefully chosen assortment of the SuperNatural acoustic and drum sounds, all organized into over 2,000 Tones. A Preview button lets you hear a phrase played with each Tone that indicates the way the programmer intended the sound to be used. This can be really interesting to check out, especially after you’ve explored a sound on your own for a while.

PCM-based programs can use up to four partials, and SuperNatural synth sounds allow up to three oscillators per voice. Single-cycle waveforms feature a couple of different variations, and the sawtooth wave has Roland’s signature “Super Saw” detune option on tap. A choice of two filters—two-pole (12dB per octave) and four-pole (24dB per octave)—are available, each with multiple lowpass, highpass, and bandpass options. ADSR envelopes for the Filter and Amp sections (Pitch has a simple attack-decay envelope) and two LFOs round out the modulators.

The Tones are broken down into 20 categories, which can be accessed using the row of ten buttons under the display.  Each of these house two categories and the first category is the default when the button is pushed. Organ sounds include “Super Natural” patches with individual draw bar control (via the screen and/or Sound Modify knobs) and a very respectable Leslie simulation, after the fashion of Roland’s VK and VR series keyboards. 

Sound Modifiers and Effects 

These six knob can do all sorts of things, depending on the setting of the Select button, which toggles them between four different rows. The first row sets the knobs to control Cutoff, Resonance, Attack (amp), Release (amp), Pan, and Level for each sound. The second sets each knob to cut or boost different EQ bands. The third row is assignable. The fourth row is all about effects. The first knob adds compression, the second knob modifies the overall EQ curve of the instrument—turning left boosts the mids (better for playing in a band) while turning it right  boosts the lows and highs (more desirable in solo applications)—knobs 3 and 4 handle system chorus and reverb amounts. Knob 5 selects which Total Effect (TFX) is used, while knob 5 controls a preset parameter of the current TFX.

Speaking of effects, each of the parts in a Studio set can have its own multi-effect (MFX), chosen from a list of 67 effects (44 individual and 23 combinations such as Overdrive into Chorus or Distortion into Delay). Vocoder functionality is also available if a mic is plugged in to the rear panel. Six Comp+EQ effects are onboard for leveling and tweaking drum sounds to taste. In addition, there are global Chorus and Reverb effects, a Master EQ and total effects (TFX), which include things like DJFX and BPM Loopers, Bit Crush, Slicer, Vinyl Sim and Radio Tuning, and process the entire signal (including all other effects). There’s even a dedicated input reverb that can be used while routing an external signal through the FA-06 when tracking or performing. 

Sequencer 

The onbord 16-track sequencer offers real time non-stop looping (with the ability to switch tracks while recording), linear and step-time recording options, track selection via the sampler pads, and full-featured editing—right down to the ability to see events graphically or in an edit list (called Microscope). A mixer page provides convenient access to pan, volume, reverb and chorus sends, as well as mute and solo functions. The killer app here, though, is that sequences can be rendered to an inserted SD memory card not just as stereo mixes or Standard MIDI data (though these options are available, as is the case on many workstations and arranger keyboards), but as full-bandwidth individual tracks in WAV format. This lets you bang out sketches or cues using the FA’s keyboard, knobs, and sampler pads, and then bring all the tracks into your DAW for multi-track mixing and processing—without having to re-record audio or find appropriate soft synths for MIDI tracks to drive. 

FA Connectivity 

The rear panel houses the SDHC card slot, which comes already loaded with a 4GB card and can be used to export sequencer tracks as audio. A pair of balanced 1/4" outputs are supplemented by a third balanced out, which can be used to send a click track or individual part that you don’t want in the main mix outs. The Sub Out is unaffected by the main volume slider. An 1/8" input allows monitoring of a stereo playback device, and an unbalanced 1/4" in can route a guitar, bass, or mic through the FA for monitoring, sampling, or direct routing to a DAW via USB. A dedicated Hold jack is provided for a sustain pedal, and two other jacks can be configured to operate with either a switch or a continuous pedal. A USB2 port allows direct connection to a computer, while a second USB port is available for hooking up a thumb drive for updating the instrument’s operating system or adding a WiFi dongle to enable iPad control.

Conclusions 

While most of the keyboard players do their recording on computers and other devices, the Roland FA series changes everything by helping to create songs on the go. The FA series takes the best of a bunch of Roland’s engines and libraries, rolls them together with a new ergonomic interface, and wraps it up in a solidly built, attractive package that’s even easy to transport. If you’re mainly recording using a DAW, it can even become an integral part of that workflow with the touch of a button. The FA is clearly one of Roland’s finest workstations to date, and is worth serious consideration by anyone looking to pick up a state-of-the-art all-in-one instrument.