Roland

The champion of Arabia never got to write the book, but gave Roland Phillips a title for his, a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through British-Irish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916.Casement gazes from a cover that splices two portraits into a discomfiting whole, preparing the reader for immersion in a life that crossed sexual, geographic and ideological boundaries, and a journey that made him a martyr for some, a traitor for others.Just as Casement…

At CES 2023, Roland introduced a streaming mixer called Bridge Cast, which can give creators a way to pipe different audio feeds to different destinations and make it easy for them to create mixes, add vocal effects and remove unwanted audio. Now, the company has unveiled a follow-up to the device called Bridge Cast X that adds video support on top of all its predecessor's audio-focused features. The Bridge Cast X has two HDMI input ports and an HDMI Thru connector that can feed video up to 4K in resolution to an external…

The Motional Pad is great, the terrible name aside. It seems like a bit of a gimmick at first — a large X/Y touchpad, not unlike the Korg Kaoss Pad, dedicated to modulation. But once you get past the initial strangeness (and Roland’s factory patches that lean hard into its gimmicky side), it’s hard not to see the value. It’s used to control the waveshaping and phase modulation of oscillator one, but you can also assign almost any parameter you want to the X and Y axis and change them by simply dragging…

Roland Allen loves notebooks. Why wouldn’t he? He is, after all, a writer. In his new study, delightfully subtitled A History of Thinking on Paper, he declares: “If your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium – and your mirror.” Paul Valéry was at least as devoted to his notebooks as the symbolist poetry for which he is best known. He awoke early each morning for half a century to write in them, amassing 261 books in total. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I earn the right to be…

Roland just unveiled its latest software plugin instrument. Galaxias, not to be confused with the Galaga-esque arcade game Galaxia, offers access to 20,000 sounds, leading Roland to call it “one big super instrument.” It runs as a standalone application on both macOS and Windows, in addition to operating as a VST3 or AU plugin.This looks a lot like as Galaxias provides access to sounds across Roland’s entire history. There are presets sourced from nearly every Roland instrument you can think of, from the iconic Jupiter 8…

Director Roland Emmerich hates Earth. This we know; it’s why so many of his movies feature the planet under attack by aliens, Godzillas, moons, and so forth. But it appears his frustration with not being able to properly destroy the planet is getting to him, because Emmerich is going to space... specifically Space Nation, his new sci-fi multimedia project.Are Big Consumer Facing Tech Companies Redeemable? Joining forces with a few of the folks behind the massively popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, Emmerich wants Space…

Film director Roland Emmerich is powered by everyone’s favorite punching bags, NFTs. The director of Independence Day, Stargate just announced Space Nation Online, a forthcoming RPG that's going to be part of a larger shared universe encompassing animated shorts, a live-action TV show and plenty of Web3 nonsense. To that end, there’s a bile-inducing page surrounding the “Web3 Space Opera MMO”, if you want to throw away your money on a procedurally-generated picture of a starship or whatever. The developers say the…

Roland’s synth lineup seems a little odd at times. It doesn’t really offer much in the midrange. Its only two pure synthesizers in the $500 to $800 space are the 13-year-old Gaia SH-01 and the eight-year-old (and objectively hideous) JD-Xi. The company has mostly been focused on its miniaturized classics in the range and building out its lineup for the last few years. The company’s doesn’t perfectly fill this gap in the lineup, but it’s a big step in the right direction. It’s a synth-focused desktop groovebox with lots…

Last year during Superbooth Roland unveiled the Aira Compact series – its first true competitors to Korg’s wildly successful Volca line. Now the company is back for Superbooth 2023 with a new addition to the family, the S-1 Tweak Synth. Like the T-8 and J-6, the S-1 uses Roland’s Analog Circuit Behavior (ACB) technology to recreate the sound of an iconic instrument from its past, the SH-101. While the core of the S-1 is ultimately quite familiar, in true Roland fashion there’s a lot of modern features packed in as well.…

Phyto by Antoine Dautry on UnsplashHow to create statistical plots using the AlgebraOfGraphics.jl (and Makie.jl) packageThe Grammar of Graphics (GoG) is a theoretical concept, which is the base of many popular graphics packages (like ggplot2 in R or ggplot in Python). Within the Julia ecosystem there are even several graphics packages based on the GoG. So the user has the choice. Therefore I’ve created this series of articles to compare these packages in order to make the choice easier.I’ve started the series with an…