The Roland S-1 is a tiny 4 note poly synthesizer, that has a great deal of functionality packed into it. Straight away the demos on the device sound impressive and hint at what is to come. Trying to unlock that power and actually use the thing to create new sounds I like, I found to be a frustrating experience though. I found the sibiling Roland T-8 much easier to use. On the Roland S-1 some of the functions are hidden behind the Shift function, or into a menu to unlock the Chorus. And all of the functions are controlled with the miniture encoders and visualized in the impossible to love retro LED display.
Roland S-1 with a MIDI Controller Keyboard
Frustrated with the small controls, I took to mapping the S1 to my favourite 61 Key MIDI Controller Keyboard – the Arturia Keylab Mk2. Well I say favourite, but its the only 61 key that I have at the moment. It has 9 nicely arranged encoders and sliders, pads and various other buttons. The S1 has a mighty selection of control codes for mapping on the back few pages of the manual. A great many more than its J6 ad T8 siblings.
It is possible to map the LFO, ASDR, Filter, Envelope and the FX. At first glance it seems everything is mapable but this is not quite the case. Frustratingly I found that the fun Riser function that can be assigned to the Noise control is not mapable to MIDI.
The following video shows the experience I had mapping to both the Arturia Keylab Mk2 and later to the Arturia Minilab3
Roland S1 with a MIDI Controller
Arturia MIDI Control Center Templates
If you want to try out the MIDI mapping templates that I created, they can be imported with Arturia MIDI Control Center
Furthermore, there is no need to just limit yourself just to regular MIDI controller keyboards for managing the S-1, other devices such as grooveboxes can be used to. In the following video I investigate using the Novation Circuit Tracks to control the Roland S-1
Roland S-1 with Circuit Tracks MIDI control.