Recording - February 2016 - 66

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

The Seaboards are a new line of virtual instrument controllers
from British firm ROLI. These devices provide ways to intuitively
control the expression of software instruments in real time, while
rooted in an interface that's at least passingly familiar to the
player whose primary background is in traditional keyboards.

ROLI Seaboard RISE
What do you call a keyboard that's not really a keyboard?
Until very recently, ROLI's product line was limited to the
three Seaboards in its GRAND series, differing primarily in the
size of their keyboards. There's the 37-note Seaboard GRAND
Studio for $1999, the 61-note Seaboard GRAND Stage for
$2999, and the 88-note Seaboard GRAND Limited First
Edition, of which only 88 units will be made and which sells
for a whopping $8888.
As interesting as these controllers are, their pricing puts them
out of reach of any but the most dedicated experimental musician, and they lack some of the basic controls that a DAWbased composer would desire for day-to-day music production
work. Both the high price and the lack of a control surface
have been addressed by the new Seaboard RISE, which I've
had the privilege of working with for several weeks now.
While it won't be for everyone, the new technology in the RISE
is both intriguing and engaging.
So what exactly is a Seaboard, anyhow?
The basic premise that underlies all of the Seaboards is that the
conventional piano or organ keyboard is actually a pretty feeble
way to play synthesizers. A piano key throws a hammer against
strings, and an organ key runs air into a pipe; in electronic form,
they're basically switches that turn notes on and off. You can
build in technology that senses how hard they're being hit, which
provides dynamics, or how hard you press them after you hit
them, which can control note articulation, but that's about it.
Any synthesizer that's not just a glorified electric piano has
many parameters that you might want to control in real time,
but a conventional keyboard forces you to control your timbre
in other ways: pitch and mod wheels, expression pedals, turning knobs, etc. Many players have longed for a way to get
more of the structure of their sounds under their fingers for intuitive control that doesn't require an extra hand.
Alternative keyboards that add more expressive possibilities
have been around for decades. Perhaps the most famous is
the Haken Continuum, effectively a long strip of spring-loaded
fabric that can be tapped, pressed, and slid around on, to
give multidimensional control of pitch, brightness, vibrato, and
much more. Other approaches involve large arrays of individually touch-sensitive keys, like the Madrona Labs Soundplane
and the Roger Linn Linnstrument. The Seaboard attempts to
make this sort of multidimensional control understandable to
folks who would love to experiment with it but are rooted in
conventional keyboard technique.
The Seaboard's playing surface is made up of what ROLI
calls "keywaves", laid out in a manner reminiscent of a piano
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RECORDING February 2016

keyboard. That design allows
keyboard players to find the
right notes by muscle memory, but the resemblance to a conventional keyboard ends there. The playing surface is actually
one continuous sensor that tracks finger position and movement, pressure, and more, for every point at which it is
touched. The rounded shape of each keywave, combined with
the smooth surface, allows you to easily slide up and down on
the keys, or left to right between notes, all while varying fingertip pressure.
ROLI quantifies all of this expressive control as "the five dimensions of touch": Strike, Glide, Slide, Press, and Lift. Anyone
who's familiar with the details of MIDI keyboard control will recognize Strike as attack velocity (how hard the key is hit), Press
as either polyphonic or monophonic aftertouch (how hard each
key is pressed after hitting), and Lift as release velocity (how
quickly you let go of the key... yes, that's a thing). Glide and
Slide represent horizontal and vertical movement of the fingertip
while holding down a note; in MIDI terms they correspond
roughly to pitch bend and to a MIDI Control Change slider.
The RISE of a new design
The Seaboard RISE has a 2-octave surface with 25 keywaves, with marked white lines to guide the eyes to the raised
"black" keys. The playing surface also includes two ribbonlike
horizontal surfaces, one above and one below the keywaves,
where a fingertip can be slid from left to right for large pitch
bends. Over on the left, there's a nice set of left-hand controls
that the GRAND models lack. They provide octave shift, preset
selection, and hands-on control of multiple parameters via
three sliders and one XY pad. In Expression Mode, the sliders
control the sensitivity of Glide, Slide, and Press; in MIDI Mode,
they have assignable MIDI CC numbers for conventional use
as a mod wheel, data sliders, etc.
The left edge of the case, which is less than an inch thick,
has a 1/4" sustain/expression pedal jack, USB A and B ports,
and a port for an optional DC power supply. The Seaboard
RISE can charge over the USB B port at a slower rate than if
an external power supply is used; the USB A port allows it to
connect to an iOS device without a special cable or adapter.
It's battery-powered and has the option of connecting wirelessly to your computer or iGizmo via Bluetooth.
When you first open up the box, you're struck by just how much
effort has gone into every aspect of the Seaboard RISE. First off,
instead of just putting a couple of styrofoam endcaps around the
keyboard to hold it in its shipping box, ROLI has provided a

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