Cakewalk V-Studio 700 arrived

I posted an entry before about the demonstration that Roland did in my studio with their latest product the V-Studio 700. Well I was so enthusiastic about it that I decided to order it right away. As one of the launching customers I could make a good deal on it that will benefit us both I guess :) I will tell you more about that later. I used to work on a Tascam US2400, but always had trouble properly integrating it in Sonar. Well this really is a dream come true. This is really total integration for me. I can do almost everything from the console without even touching a mouse or keyboard. Great job Roland and Cakewalk! I love it already. This will really speed up my work flow. And it also really finished my desk.

Here you see a close up of the right part of the console. One of the things I love is the surround panner that I never got working on the US-2400. Well now it works like a charm and it even can be assigned to more functions. The transport part also is very neat. Also the jog shuttle has multiple functions you can easily assign. You can use it to navigate your project, but also to select parts of your track and zoom in and out. Very cool! The big handle you see is used for several functions as well, but the neatest is that you can fade the controls from your loaded VST's in and out. Easy to adjust some parameter and then go back to your project without having to close and open the VST again.

And here is another close up of the left part of the console. The left lower part is what I love the most. It holds all kinds of Cakewalk functions like opnening and closing certain views in Sonar. I used to grab my mouse for that, but now it is so much quicker. In the left upper part is the ACT controller. You can use this to adjust parameter of the currently access VST. You can see in the display right away which parameter you are changing. The same goes for the faders by the way. Very convenient is that you see your track name in the display right over the fader. A great feature Roland came up with is fader locking. You can browse through all your tracks per bank of 8 faders but you can lock one of them. In this way you can assign tracks to faders from different parts of your projects and have just the ones you need at that moment in front of you. Very clever!

In this last picture you see the audio box that comes with it. I won't use the inputs and outputs on there. I'm sure they are very good, but I already have 128 inputs and outputs on my RME MADI interfaces and using two audio interfaces together is possible with WDM/KS but it will have different latencies then and that is not convenient. I usually use the ASIO drivers by the way and then it is not possible at all. But what is cool is that in this box is also an actual Roland Fantom synthesizer that you can use as a VST in Sonar. The unit acts as a DSP and doesn't use any CPU on you host. You can even add an extra ARX board to the synthesizer for even more sounds. The sounds is very good of this synthesizer I can tell you. Well all in all I'm very impressed already and even haven't dug into all the functions yet, but I already know this will save me a lot of time when I'm working on my music production. So big compliments for Cakewalk and Sonar!