The Seaboard block is Roli in a nutshell. MIDI Polyphonic Expression… check. Squishy surface… check. Democratising a previously elite technology… absolutely.

Roli has taken a Tesla-esque approach to its Seaboard rollout. Starting at the top, with an end game to reach the mass market. The Grand was expensive and made for ‘real’ keyboardists looking to take a chance on MPE, the Rise series was more affordable and suited to people more likely to play a chord on a synth than a sonata on a piano. Seaboard Block is cheap enough, small enough and fun enough for anyone.

SIZE MATTERS

At almost half the width of Roli’s previous Seaboard, Rise 25, the Block version gets straight to the point. The entire purpose of the Seaboard is to place the five core dimensions of MPE at your fingertips. Seaboard block does that as economically as possible.

As well as Roli’s squishy keys with 5D expression, the Seaboard block has room to slide up and down the two-octave span above and below the keys. It also has arrows at each end to nudge the keys up or down octaves, in a six octave range.

While the Rise has extra sliders and an X/Y pad for limiting or expanding the range of motion on the fly, you can expand your Seaboard block with a Lightpad block to perform those functions, if you absolutely require them.

The Seaboard block magnetically snaps into the Blocks ecosystem via built-in DNA connectors. You can hook up Lightpad blocks, control blocks, or more Seaboard blocks to create a ‘seamless’ multi-octave keyboard.

I didn’t have two Seaboard blocks to snap together, so I can’t say exactly how seamlessly they connect, but the dimensions seem to be spot on for the same gap to occur between octaves. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t expect to be able to slide my finger seamlessly between two units without a break in the note.

At just one and a half times the depth of a Lightpad block, I didn’t feel like it was any harder/easier to play the Block version versus the slightly bigger Rise and Grand keys. It’s still tough for a newbie, and gratifyingly expressive to the familiar.

IT’S MAKING NOISE

Roli’s Noise app continues to improve. It’s now available on Google Pixel as well as iOS devices. The number of packs continues to expand, as does the in-app purchase catalogue. With Pharrell Williams recently coming onboard as Roli’s Chief Creative Officer, you can download free sample packs for N.E.R.D.’s single Lemon. On the other end, Audio Modelling have an amazing SWAM engine, acoustically-modelled string section with violin, viola, cello and double bass for just US$14.99.

Last time I reviewed a Blocks device, I lamented Ableton’s lack of support for MPE. Not a whole lot has changed on Ableton’s side, it still requires a bit of a workaround and arming 16 tracks at once for maximum polyphony. Although Live 10 brings with it the ability to edit multiple MIDI clips at once, allowing you to potentially edit your Seaboard masterpieces. It’s limited to eight MIDI clips at a time. So you can either choose to either edit the two parts separately or limit the polyphony to eight. We’ll get there eventually Ableton… right?

While Ableton’s a bit slow to the MPE party, Roli is doing its darnedest to put polyphonic expression in everyone’s hands, even full-time creators.

Noise is fully Ableton Link-compatible. It’s super easy to setup, and you can play along with any Ableton project and other Link-enabled apps and devices. Once you’ve laid down all your extra expressive parts inside Noise, you can now export an Ableton project, and save it to your phone or a cloud service. It only took a couple of minutes to save 16 four-bar audio loops. Then I could open them in my computer and continue on, with tempo intact and all the tracks neatly named and laid out in Session view.

It’s a much simpler way of integrating the Seaboard Block into your Ableton workflow. Of course, if you’re on Bitwig, Logic, Cubase, Reaper, or even Garageband, just plug it in and jam away on Roli’s Equator or any of the built-in or third-party MPE compatible plug-ins.

Roli is truly on a roll. And yet again, I can’t help but recommend Blocks as a way of getting in touch with MPE. The Seaboard Block is absolutely brilliant.  

I’m always on the lookout for the studio of the future. What image that conjures up in my mind is forever changing, but it always centres around one goal; achieving more complex tasks, easier, and with more musicality. MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) fits squarely into that mould. Or should that be ‘fits cubely’?

What is MPE? Think of it like breaking down the barriers between notes. You can slide between any pitch, or modulate a sound by pressure or movement, all without lifting a finger to grab a mod or pitch wheel, knob or joystick.

We’ve already covered ROLI’s Seaboards, which look like keyboards but feel like a gel shoe insole. Awkward to play on at first — like learning how to walk again — but with four extra dimensions of touch to spur you on through the learning curve, you’ll be gliding around the keys in no time.

The core of ROLI’s Blocks is the Lightpad. It’s square, with a tough plastic body and a silicone top. The top has a bit of give, but it’s hardly the level of squish of a Seaboard, it feels more like a drum pad you might find on a Push, or similar. This is where all your finger-drumming and notes are played in.

It’s got ‘DNA’ connectors on all sides. These magnetically lock other Blocks into place as well as passing power and control signals. At the moment there are two other Blocks in the series; the Loop and Live blocks. Both essentially bring software-based controls from the Blocks-specific Noise app into the hardware domain. Loop is recording specific, and the Live block is catered to performance. Both of these are rectangular, with two joining together to form the same size square as the Lightpad. All of them have onboard batteries that are rechargeable via a USB-C connection on the Lightpad.

MAKING NOISE

There are two main ways you can use Blocks. The standard mode is pairing it via Bluetooth with ROLI’s Noise iOS app. The second way is to connect it to your computer via a USB-C cable (Blocks ships wth a USB-C to USB-A cable) and using it to your control your DAW through the Blocks Dashboard application, which is currently still in beta. We’ll get to that, but first, Noise.

Noise is free of charge. It’s a fun app with great quality sounds, making it worth grabbing even if you don’t have Blocks. You can still operate the app with your fingertips, you’ll just be missing the two touch dimensions on the Z axis — Press and Lift.

It interfaces perfectly with Blocks. It’s essentially a four-instrument sequencer, allowing you to create four-bar 4/4 loops in slots along a grid. There’s also snap, which automatically quantises your playing. I’m unsure of exactly how much quantisation or of what sort the snap option is imbuing, but it mostly seems musical and adaptive to whatever other parts you’ve laid down. It seems especially smart for a non-adjustable function, especially considering there’s also no swing control.

There is a tempo dial, but no tap tempo, which means you can’t tap to get beats moving quickly if you’ve already got an idea in your head. There’s a sense ROLI wants you to start from nothing within the boundaries of the Lightpad and four bar loops.

Also, despite there being a host of chord, arpeggio and scale types to choose from, there’s no way of breaking out of 4/4. You can also only select one chord type at a time, without any recourse to alter chords after you’ve recorded a pass or on the fly. I found the Blocks concept had lots of little tradeoffs like this along the way. It’s the curse of attempting to make an instrument that’s simple enough for someone with little music experience to get started on, but actual musicians want to play.

For instance, you can’t overdub parts, which means you have to be an ace at finger drumming if you want to execute anything complex. There’s also no mixer; all the patches play back at their pre-defined level. And while you can change each of the four sounds you’re working with at any time, it changes them globally across all your loops. Much like Ableton’s session view. With three banks or four loops for each part, it becomes a test of invention. How many 4/4 parts can you play with the same instrument that fit the other loops you’ve already laid down. It’s like a Chinese whisper of musical ideas. You don’t know where you’ll end up at the last set of loops, and sometimes you’ll rue the selected palette of sounds.

Other gripes include the inability to reorder loops, you can only re-record over them. In playback mode, once you set a loop to trigger at the next four bar start point, you can’t change your mind and trigger a different loop of that instrument until it has completed a four bar cycle. On the upside, Roli just released an update allowing users to export WAV stems via iTunes to use in a DAW.

With all that, it might sound like a hated the Blocks experience. On the contrary. As with all creative pursuits; limitations can be liberating. While there are some annoyances, sure, the sounds on offer are well-selected, modern and eminently playable. You can also expand your palette with packs from RZA, Steve Aoki and more. It’s the most fun I’ve had with mobile music-making. With a fully-charged Lightpad and your phone, you can prod and play for hours. Pound for pound, there’s no other instrument that gives you the level of expression a Lightpad can for its size.

It’s not often our industry births something that’s genuinely new. Most ‘new’ gear is often just a reworked rendition of an old idea; iteration over innovation. Alternatively designs harken back to something familiar. Sure, traces of piano DNA are obviously interwoven into Roli’s Seaboard. Nevertheless, any vestiges of its ancestry have been so heavily mutated that the descendant bears little resemblance to, and feels unlike, anything we’ve seen before. Maybe that’s why this ‘keyboard controller’ has caused such a ruckus.

Product reviews typically have an element of ‘compare and contrast’ woven into them. Finding a similar product as a touchstone for the Roli Seaboard was tough. It’s truly one-of-a-kind. The Seaboard could be the beginning of a whole new paradigm of music creation.

Good music producers are all about expression. They’ll use any means to inject life and dynamics into a performance in order to make virtual instruments sound less like robots and more human. The Seaboard’s grand idea is that it offers all those dimensions of expression right under your fingertips. When you press a key on a typical keyboard controller, you have three dimensions to ‘play’ with; static pitch information, velocity and aftertouch control (if you’re lucky, polyphonic aftertouch). You either have to thumb a mod wheel to add vibrato, or jockey a pitch wheel to bend the note up or down. The Seaboard has those things licked. Want vibrato? Just wiggle your finger on the ‘key’ like a violinist on a fretted string. Want to pitch up or down? Simply slide your finger over to the next note. Need to control a filter effect? Merely slide your finger up and down the key. It’s a radically new way of interacting with digital instruments.

RIDING THE WAVE

I’ll be honest, I’ve been waiting to get my fingers on a Seaboard ever since it appeared on Kickstarter. The demos all looked incredibly promising — riffing off against a real guitar, a full band track played on one instrument — and as a keyboard player, I was drawn to the idea of an instrument that looked so natural to play. Still, nothing quite prepares you for that first touch. The rubbery surface is squishy, yet firm. Smooth enough to slide around on, but holds its shape to give enough distinction between notes. The Seaboard’s playing surface is dubbed a keywave, not a keyboard, because adjacent ‘waves’ can be flowed into each other by simply sliding down one side and up the next. It makes you completely rethink your playing style.

I quickly found my piano knowledge was of limited benefit with the Seaboard. Sure, you know where to find an A or F#, but in reality this is a completely new instrument that requires an entirely new muscle memory. Forget about the jump from a grand piano to an unweighted synth, this is like going from a mouse to a touchpad. You can navigate to all the same places, but pinches, swipes and three-finger presses can condense multiple commands into one.

The most tedious challenge when learning how to play the Seaboard was the difficulty of consistently hitting keys in the right spot, especially when playing chords or runs. Unlike a normal keyboard, sharp or flat notes are extended down on the keywave to occupy the recessed space between the ‘white’ C-scale notes. That means the ‘white’ notes don’t butt up against each other, and if you’re not hitting a key squarely in the centre, you’re likely triggering a semitone up or down — or even worse, somewhere in between. Not nice. Trying to knock out a classical piece your first time on the Seaboard will almost definitely result in frustration and some very iffy accidentals (not the sharp or flat kind). However, after putting in the hours my fingers became accustomed to the slimmer notes and those dodgy mis-hits showed up less and less.

Similar to when multi-touch smartphones first appeared, you’ll need to learn some new gestures to get the most out of the Seaboard. Say I want to pitch bend a note up a fifth from F to C. Ideally this should be a smooth slide. Thumbing the F, you’d drag it down to the flat section of the keywave, slide your finger across and ‘relay’ the note to your index finger on the C key. But nailing even this simple move is trickier than it seems. If you hit the C too early or too late, it’ll trigger as a separate note. Or if you just slide your finger over the keywaves you’ll misfire a bunch of in-between notes on the way up.

So it needs to be said: the Roli Seaboard will not immediately replace your conventional MIDI keyboard controller. If you practise long and hard you’ll manage to feel as at-home on the Seaboard as you would on a familiar keyboard. Just don’t expect it to happen in a hurry. It’s quite literally like learning a new instrument, providing scope for each person to develop their own Seaboard style.