Roland E-4

Good with room for improvement

This box is great fun. It works really well for what it’s intended for - desktop jamming at home or on the road. It’s not really built for stage use. That said you might be able to find a use for it live.

I haven’t spent much time with the vocoder, but it works pretty well, if you wanna sound like a robot or Imogen Heap/Jacob Collier

The limitations are:

-no presets, so you need to set everything. This is fine, but if you’re using the harmoniser, setting the key is a bit finicky.

- secondary controls using the sliders mean that glancing at the device doesn’t necessarily reflect how it’s set

- harmoniser can be set to all 12 chromatic tones, but only major or minor. And as far as I can tell, there’s no difference in how it handles relative scales i.e G major is the same as E minor

- harmoniser level can’t be changed. So if you want more lead and less harmony, you’re out of luck

- harmoniser voicing a are somewhat limited

I hope some of the above issues will be addressed in a future update? In my experience of Boss/Roland products, firmware updates can be lacklustre.

All in all a great toy I’m sure anyone will have fun with.

Roland E-4 compact, talks the talk!

These great new compacts from Roland , certainly pack a punch for the money. Great quality, that you would expect from Roland and the functionality and workflow are easy to get to grips with . The lithium battery saves you money on buying batteries, which can be expensive. The sound of this thing is amazing for the price and size . The only downside is , I was not able to download the manual on the Roland site (there is no manual in the box). other than that , I don`t think you can go far wrong buying one of these fun boxes.