Recording - April 2018 - 58

ROLI

BLOCKS
REVIEWS BY MIKE METLAY
OLI, creator of expressive high-end controllers like
the Seaboard RISE (reviewed February 2016),
hasn't rested on its laurels. With the BLOCKS
ecosystem, the technologies developed for the original
Seaboards have been scaled down in size and price to a
format that anyone can enjoy. BLOCKS provides ways to
get into music making in an expandable and flexible way,
with points for portability, approachable pricing, and-
most important of all-the tremendous expressive power
that ROLI pioneered with the Seaboards, a technology it
calls 5D Touch.
Three of the "five dimensions of touch" that ROLI
refers to are well-known to anyone who's played with
MIDI controller keyboards. ROLI calls them Strike (velocity,
how hard a key is hit), Press (aftertouch, pressure on a key
after it's been played), and Lift (release velocity, how quickly
a key is let go). In addition to these, ROLI adds Glide
(horizontal movement after playing a note) and Slide
(vertical movement). In effect, every place you touch on a
5D Touch instrument is like a pressure-sensitive joystick!
Playing one of these surfaces is a very tactile and
rewarding process: you can bend notes, shape timbre,
and control loudness and effects, all without ever reaching
for a pitch bender, mod wheel, or control surface. It's all
under your fingers, and you can articulate each note
individually-instead of bending or modulating all notes
at once, you can bend only one note like you can on a
pedal steel guitar, or add depth to particular voices inside
a chord just by digging in or moving one finger. It's fun
and addictive, and with BLOCKS, it's now accessible to
pretty much everyone.

The ecosystem

The hardware elements in the system (called, naturally,
Blocks) team up with the ROLI software for iOS to provide
a complete, self-contained music making environment. It's
unlike anything else out there, and it's aimed at the beginner
who might be frightened or frustrated by complicated
configuration-it should be easy, straightforward, and fun
to just sit down and make music.
58

RECORDING April 2018

Controllers
and software for

21st Century songwriters
ROLI does this with a proprietary connection system called
DNA. It uses magnets and flush-mounted contacts, so you make
and break connections just by setting Blocks next to each other
and clicking them together. This can be done in nearly any configuration you can think of; the connectors are "smart" and share
both power and performance data, while knowing which Block
is where and what it's supposed to be doing. Blocks are sized in
"units" of roughly 1.8", so they fit together neatly in various ways.
You can add and remove Blocks on the fly, and your system
will instantly reconfigure itself to account for the changes. Blocks
can communicate via Bluetooth, or they can be connected via
USB-C cables (also used to charge them). Each Block has a
unique serial number; when adding a new Block for the first
time, you'll be asked to register it to your account on the ROLI
website, after which all of your iOS devices will recognize it.

NOISE

NOISE is the main BLOCKS app. While buying extra sounds
and drum kits for it can add up, the base application is free
and comes with a very good set of starter sounds. It comes in
both iPad and iPhone versions, which are functionally identical;
because so much of the BLOCKS experience is contained
within NOISE, it's the logical place to start our tour.
When you open a new Project in NOISE, the Song page
opens. There's a 4 x 4 grid on the left and a 4-channel mixer
with mute buttons and instrument select buttons on the right.
Each grid (you can preprogram three per Project) represents

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - April 2018