I was reading some Reddit posts and apparently, the ROLI management team is/was pretty bad.
At least, they’re planning to make more Seaboards in 2022. Good because I want one 
Yeah, I was looking at that yesterday. Could hardly find any listed on Reverb and they were all way overpriced. Unless Osmose has something for slides, I want a Seaboard eventually because they let you play any pitch and they aren’t as expensive as a Haaken Continuum. Except maybe for the OG seaboard grand, which no one seems to remember anymore. Even Roli’s company bio says they started with seaboard blocks, which totally came after the grand and then the rise seaboards.
Sooo, ROLI seems to be bankrupt because they tried to scale up too fast and burned through all the money, allegedly not delivering stuff to customers while allegedly still taking orders, allegedly?
That’s a damn shame. I love their Equator synth and also liked their MPE controllers even though not buying one, and was close to buying a LUMI for my son a while ago (glad I picked another keyboard because it had more keys…).
Anybody has any insight on the topic? Is some other vulture wonderful coprolite company gonna pick up their stuff?
Also, is anybody here a member of the ROLI Repairs Discord where they talk about keeping things alive and could send me an invite? Somebody might have an idea on how to keep Equator alive…
I could see someone buying them up. Won’t hazard a guess as to who.
I think their fundamental problem was that they thought the music market was bigger than it actually is. The product is fine, but I think they really expected to just sell more units than they could actually move. I think that they really wanted to sell the hardware with a lower margin and make it up on software, lessons, and sound packs. Focusing on a new producer/musician. But, idk about you guys but I wouldn’t recommend MPE to a beginner or even to most musicians.
I think if the seaboard had never gone to blocks, stayed like $500 for the 25 key and closer to 1000 for the 49 key, and stopped at equator with sound packs, we wouldn’t have this thread. Instead of having the cheapest mainstream MPE controller by half price from the Osmose CE, they really wanted to get to 1/3 and they sacrificed margin (and features) to do that. On the assumption that price is what was keeping people away from MPE. I don’t think that assumption holds up and the business case falls apart if I’m right.
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Yeah, I tend to agree. Even though I would recommend MPE controllers to most musicians that are not complete beginners (not because I think they would need all aspects of MPE, but because of expressivity in the sense of just using additional information monophonically like another dimension beside note and velocity and being able to do pitchslides), most users of DAWs still seem to be happy with using an on/off note trigger as Linn would say. The worlds of electronic music production and traditional musical instruments haven’t grown together as much as some people expected. Getting a nice orchestral sample library that you can play with a basic controller or sampling someone who can play a real instrument makes more sense for many people compared to learning to play expressively on an MPE controller. I still think that more people switching to MPE is gonna happen, but it is a very, very slow process.
Also, I think ROLI abandoning stuff such as Blocks hurt them additionally. I was thinking about getting multiple blocks, but having a LinnStrument, it wasn’t something I needed to do fast. When I looked into it again, it was already gone. After them abandoning it all, I was very hesitant getting something else from them. Even getting Equator took me many years and a good second-hand deal even though I really wanted it, just because I didn’t trust them very much after that.
But yeah, I think you are right that making them very cheap to sell a huge number of them with a small margin was not the best plan.
I think that even makes sense from a basic perspective watching some really good MPE videos that one might think serve as advertisements - the playing style sometimes can be intimidating. If you want to sell lots of these things cheap, one should focus on showing how you can use expressivity in a very basic way effectively as a beginner, like making some nice and simple pitch-slide basslines, simple emotional monophonic melodies and so on. But that’s just a thought based on general MPE videos I have watched in the past, I haven’t really watched their marketing videos.
I’m in the same boat, was interested in Equator at one point (and I think they had some co-developed synths with Ge Force? Not sure who it was but there was one I thought was cool). And if you look at Expressive E now, they have almost exactly the same thing that Roli had at their most successful.
So the Roli waves came with Equator I think and then a discount code for some of the other synths, each with hundreds of custom designed pre-mapped presets.
Osmose now comes with Ctrl-e, which is a preset player/mapper for all of their soundpacks on other synths. It basically loads up an instance of the synth in question in the background (Dune 3, Hive 2, Kontrast, Lounge Lizard, etc), and if you own the synth and soundpack then it will load the whole synth patch for you to tweak. If you don’t, you still get some macros. So you get a couple thousand software sounds even if you get the entry level Osmose. The difference is the price, Expressive E is staying around $1000 and has more expensive versions that make up the bulk of their sales. Also, those synths are all expensive, but very good with reputations outside of being bundled with Osmose. And they give you a deal on the synth + soundpacks if you register an Osmose. Like, I think I got Kontrast with all the soundbanks for $100 on black friday last year. I’m interested in getting Lounge Lizard at some point too, save myself 10k on a Rhodes 
So all that is to say, I think Roli wasn’t far off the mark, they just never should have pursued downmarket volume.
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With regard to co-developing, maybe the stuff they did together with FXpansion? I think they took them over at some point and made a new version of Cypher and maybe some other synths (most FXpansion stuff was discontinued AFAIK, I remember that I was interested in Geist at some point).
Offtopic, but I absolutely want to get an Osmose (with synth, not CE) at some point. One of the things holding me back is that some people wrote they don’t like the “wiggling” of the keys and the keys sometimes get stuck when you let them go depending on how much you wiggled them… What’s your experince with that? COming from the Linnstrument, it all still seems a bit strange to me, but I love the thought of having a good synth engine inside of an MPE controller and the Continuum is crazy expensive…
Yeah I was thinking of FXpansion. Good memory.
I haven’t had any problems with my unit and it is from the very first batch. And I mean I literally cannot recall ever having a single issue. I can’t say that for the other keyboards I’ve owned (sticking keys occasionally, etc). I admittedly don’t play a lot - maybe a few hours a month.
I play it mostly like a keyboard. In fact my most common use case is to put it in Poly AT mode and play my other synths. I know if you watch the demos that it CAN do so much more than that, and I do play that sometimes. I’ve gotten better over the years, but it does take some practice to play it fluidly (or you can take your time with slower ambient stuff drenched in FX). You kind of have to think of each preset as it’s own instrument because they can have very different play styles. Some will let you play more or less like a standard keyboard, but some really want you to expressively play one or two notes. So switching presets can be like jumping from a Iridium (hold long chords and let the sound design do the work) to a Minimoog (fast and funky) in terms of what you have to play to get the most out of it. And learning all those playstyles and which presets you like, how to tweak them to your preferences, that takes time. It’s very rewarding to dig in and do that, and I definitely don’t do it enough. You could get rid of everything else in my studio and the Osmose by itself (without Ctrl-E, which is pretty cool : without using the Haken editor to learn and make your own sounds : without controlling any other software/hardware) would easily keep me busy for 6+ months really digging into everything it can do and learning to play and get the most out of the built-in presets.
It’s really a player’s keyboard in a way I’ve never experienced before, and I think that aspect of it is underrated because of how many other sounds you have at your fingertips and the control possibilities over other hardware and software. That’s all pros, it’s just so many pros that it becomes a con if you want to get everything out of this keyboard that it has to offer because it will take years, if not decades.
I’d say if you are interested, it’s very worth the price of admission and is arguably the best equipped product today to be the only keyboard you need in your studio as a control surface and sound generator.
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That’s a really great sales pitch 
And it really makes sense for me since it is a completely different playing style compared to the Linnstrument and especially since I don’t have any hardware synths, so without a PC I can only play traditional instruments at the moment…
Damn, now I really have to get one 