Roland Aira P-6 Sampler Review: Great Sound, Complicated Interface

In addition to crunching your samples into digital oblivion, you can process them with a ton of different effects like reverb, delay, a multi-mode filter, and most importantly, a vinyl simulator for that true 404 flavor. The six sample pads across the front aren’t velocity-sensitive, but they’re large and responsive enough to do some basic finger drumming.

Unfortunately, chopping a sample spreads it across the smaller keyboard on the bottom, rather than the larger sample pads. Those keys are tiny, mushy, and unpleasant to play. Still, if you want something small for tossing together lo-fi or boom-bap beats on the go, the P-6 isn’t a bad choice.

A Tiny Tool Kit

When building a beat, you’ve got quite a lot of tools at your disposal. You can place steps manually using the step sequencer, or play them in live to keep things off the grid. You’ve got 64 steps to work with, plus probability, sub-steps, micro-timing, and motion recording to add complexity and variety.

Then, once your loop is ready, you can use a handful of effects to create on-the-fly builds, breakdowns, and fills. Most notably there are Scatter, Step Loop, and the DJFX Looper borrowed from the SP-404.

Scatter is divisive, to say the least. It adds stutter and glitch effects based on preprogrammed patterns. It can sound OK when used sparingly and with the right settings, but it is anything but subtle and can turn more complex and melodic beats into unlistenable chaos.

Step Loop simply loops the steps you hold down on the sequencer. It’s a more flexible and interesting take on the sort of beat repeat effects you can find on other devices like the Teenage Engineering PO-133. It’s great for creating live fills and variations while jamming. It’s truly one of my favorite performance features on any piece of music gear, and I’d love to see it on more stuff.