Roland Fantom-X8 88-Key Sampling Workstation
FantomX8

Powered by Roland's Groundbreaking New Synthesis Chip
The new Fantom-X Series comes in a choice of three keyboards, but they all have one thing in common: Roland's new sound generator chip. This chip is Roland's most powerful to date, and it not only makes it possible to play expressive 4-tone Patches with 128-voice polyphony, but it also raises the Fantom-X Series' waveform capacity to approximately 1GB when fully expanded - far more memory than any other musical instrument on the market. What's more, the internal wave ROM has been doubled with quality-focused sounds that will please even the most jaded player.

Sampler or Digital Recorder?
Thanks to the power afforded by the new sound generator chip, you get both. That's because the Fantom-X is the first workstation keyboard capable of handling audio on the level of a digital recorder. This means you can record either short samples for playback on the keyboard, or long, linear takes similar to a digital recorder. And with room for up to 544MB of sample RAM, there's plenty of recording time available. Samples can be slaved to tempo with realtime timestretching and edited using powerful tools like Wave Edit and Chop. Users are free to load samples in .WAV and AIFF formats and back up data to convenient PC cards with up to 1GB capacity.

Expressive New Sounds Abound
When Roland engineers developed the Fantom-X Series, they wanted to fully exploit the potential of the new chip. That's why each keyboard comes with a brand new 128MB wave ROM loaded with quality-focused sounds like vivid new string sections, expressive and fat-sounding drums, rich nylon string guitars and an amazing 88-key split acoustic piano, which uses individual stereo multi-samples for each key and every velocity stage. Would you believe there are over 700 samples used in this single Patch? Many of the instruments were recorded in world-class studios using multiple microphones and were mixed like music into samples by renowned studio engineer Dan Blessinger (Martinsound) - resulting in a level of quality unheard of before.

The Only Workstations with Skip Back Sampling and a Dynamic Pad Bank
First introduced on the Fantom-S, Roland's Skip Back Sampling has become popular with musicians for its ability to instantly retrieve a performance and turn it into a sample. With Skip Back Sampling, your ideas never get lost because the sampler is constantly recording every note you play - be it on the keyboard or Dynamic Pad Bank - while keeping the musical bars in tact. Speaking of which, these 16 velocity- and aftertouch-sensitive pads now sport twice the polyphony and an improved feel for even more natural drum programming and sample triggering.

A True Audio/MIDI Workstation
Whether sequencing MIDI tracks, triggering samples from the Dynamic Pad Bank, or even recording audio directly to RAM, the Fantom-X Series makes putting it all together a seamless process. Lay down a drum track by combining the internal drum sounds with loops, which can automatically sync to tempo via realtime timestretch. Then record some keyboard parts as MIDI and finish your song by tracking a guitar or vocal as audio. The high-resolution sequencer boasts up to 400,000-note capacity and supports Standard MIDI File (SMF) import and export, making the Fantom-X by far the best workstation in history.