Granddaughter of Yacht
Many world events took place in the years 2000 – 2004, some wars for example. Over at Roland it seems an evil witch cast a spell over the company and for four full years they slept in their little white coats. When they woke (to a kiss?) it was to discover that everyone else had moved on. USB had been invented, Zip disks were gone, as was SCSI.
“Holy Fuck! What can we do?” asked White Lab Coat #2.
“What we always do”, said White Lab Coat #1.
“Just repackage our shit with some new dumb name.” And they did.
That’s how the Roland Luxury Yacht XV5080 got ‘revised’ into the Fantom XR. There were some changes, but really they’re in the parts they could get from their suppliers. SCSI to USB, Smart Card to PC Card, bigger DIMMS. Actual changes to the instrument? Not much. If you think I am being harsh, I’ve skipped over the fact that they made two Fantom models before this which were somehow WORSE than the XV5080.
It’s been hard to find a list of changes, so let me.
- Single rack unit, as no one uses the LCD screen any more. Less hernias.♥
- Only takes new SRX voices cards that cost buckets on eBay,
- But most of the good Oberheim / Moog / Roland waveforms are included anyway.♥
- MIDI over USB … which I can’t get to work after hours of trying. Likewise using the unit as an audio interface. Doesn’t seem to work. Shit drivers.
- Up to 512Mb of RAM for samples,♥
- But sample loading isn’t that much faster from PC card than SCSI Zip so you’ll not want to use it much anyway.
- Weird sample numbering system is still there.
- You can sample on the machine. You never will, but you CAN.
- Roland finally worked out that maybe you want to chain the three effects units together YES ♥♥♥♥♥
- And you could re-sample that.♥
- They’ve given you modulation control of the sample playback speed ♥♥♥
- It’s not a spectacular haul for four years work. But there’s a few things that they’d not addressed in the Yacht that were finally fixed here, and damn, I wanted to see them. For my Sword And Sandals Studies.
Good Shit
What was the point of having three COSM effects units that can only be used one at a time? None. Who wants to run a modulated delay through a ring modulator through a pitch shifter? Everyone. Is it worth buying a sampler/effects rack that can do this? What do you think?
Now the samples can be time modulated. Seems that you can play any sample over the whole keyboard at the same duration. Seems also that you can modulate a sample speed down to the point where it’s frozen on one grain. There’s 10 different grain sizes, so it’s not the same varispeed process as the V-Synth. Some horrible noises are likely.
Infinite Phaser. “HQ waveforms” (I guess these are 44.1KHz). Step sequencer in the LFO. That PC card is going to last a lot longer than the Zip Drive.
Bad Shit from time spent with it.
For some reason the editing software no longer has the next/previous patch and a write button. So every single time you want to select the next patch it’s knee deep in menus – I have no idea why you would remove that. I also have no idea why a write now has to be done on the box and takes FIVE frikk’n button presses – SHIFT, RIGHT, ENTER, ENTER, ENTER – what is this, a cheat code? At least now your own samples are named in the editor.
The box has more storage and that seems to have troubled the Roland White Coats. If you load up a sample from the card to RAM, that’s now found in ‘card RAM’, but if it came from the internal storage it’s in ‘user RAM’ – which is a symptom of how the machine stores samples in a non dynamic numbered table. The V-Synth will at least renumber the samples on request. This really is a XV5080 with some extra plumbing.
Your card might be 1Gb, but as samples have to be converted over from the card to memory and saved out again en masse, the effective storage is the RAM in the unit.
It really doesn’t sound that different to the Yacht, being basically the same guts. That’s not a bad thing – both are very luscious sounding machines with lots of space and movement.
Update for 2022 – is the Fantom still worth it?
Fantom XR owners are now experiencing a temperature fault in the LCD which can lead to a blank or intermittent screen – the good news is a replacement screen is now available. All this reminds you that the machine is about 16 years old and not getting any younger. Is it worth the trouble now that Zenology has replaced the old Sample and Synthesis workstations?
In many cases ZenCore is a better system, as it has virtual analogue waveforms, sync, ring and cross modulation. But the old S+S system has more ways that two tones can interact. The first sound I have on my XR uses two filters in sequence to create a wonderfully vowel like sound. No amount of work with basic Zenology can make that sound – there’s no way to combine the filters.
You can use the xv5080 model available in some Zen machines (unfortunately not the MC-700) to reproduce this patch. But then you don’t get to use your own samples. Now is probably the point to remind you – your own samples take a very very v e r y long time to load on this old machine. Make a cup of tea. The 707 is quicker but not able to replace the XR completely.
Both the Fantom and the XV5080 are capable of interesting and complex sounds just with standard saws and squares. The bible in this case is the Fantom Tweakbook by Artemiy Pavlov. It’s a commercial book, and out of print, two things that don’t work well together. But you can find a copy and buy something from his company Sinevibes.
For example the booster, which seems to be just an overdrive, is actually a means by which two tones can be made to create a kind of synch sweep. Create a resonant band pass filter sweep in one tone and combine it with another through the booster – the effect is convincing.
The book also handles time stretching and freezing, complexes of LFOs and making a 108dB ‘superfilter’.
It is now SOLD
Hear It In Action
The ‘guitar’ part is the Fantom XR – the rest is a mix of Fantom and UltraProteus.