About This Booklet; Before We Start - Roland Fantom-Xa Features Manual

About the Fantom-Xa Workshop Booklets
Roland's Fantom-Xa workstation keyboard provides lots of
creative power at an affordable price. It shares many of the
features of its more expensive siblings—the Fantom X6, X7,
and X8—including killer sounds, 128-note polyphony, a full-
featured 16-track sequencer, sampling capabilities, and so
much more.
The Fantom-Xa Workshop booklets discuss some of the
things you can do with your Fantom-Xa. Each booklet
focuses on one topic, and is intended as a companion to your
Fantom-Xa Owner's Manual.

About This Booklet

The Fantom-Xa is designed to be a great songwriter's
keyboard. From its sounds to its sampling to its built-in 16-
track sequencing capabilities, it's all about making the creative
process simple, fast, and rewarding.
The Fantom-Xa's built-in sequencer allows you to build up
a song's arrangement, bit-by-bit, adding one instrument at
a time, recording track-by-track. This is a great way to work
when you're deliberately and carefully building a song from
the ground up.
The Fantom-Xa also offers you a way to absolutely slam down
a new arrangement fast in the heat of inspiration. You can
pile on instruments without ever stopping the music until
you're finally ready to take a breath and hear what you've
done. Think of this as "speed sequencing. " It's the topic of this
booklet. Speed sequencing's a great way to throw together
a song when your new musical idea is at its freshest. You
can, of course, go back later and tidy things up, editing your
recordings, changing their sounds, and so on.
Understanding the Booklet's Symbols
Throughout this booklet, you'll come across information that
deserves special attention—that's the reason it's labeled with
one of the following symbols.
A note is something that adds information about the topic at hand.
A tip offers suggestions for using the feature being discussed.
Warnings contain important information that can help you avoid possible
damage to your equipment, your data, or yourself.

Before We Start

As shipped from the factory, the Fantom-Xa loads "Turlence, "
one of its demo songs, when you power up. You can change
this behavior if you like—we'll explain how to do this on
the next page, in "Turning Off the Automatic Loading of
'Turlence'".
In any event, if "Turlence" is loaded in your Fantom-Xa, you've
got to erase it before you can record a song of your own, since
a single Fantom-Xa song can be loaded at a time.
Clearing the Song Memory
Don't worry that you're permanently discarding "Turlence"—the song is
safely stashed in the Fantom-Xa's permanent memory. You can hear it at
any time by holding down SHIFT and pressing MENU, as described on the
Owner's Manual cover. You can also reset the Fantom-Xa to load "Turlence"
at startup, as it does straight from the factory.
2