Nick Rothwell
Hello, and welcome to the Sound On Sound people and music industry podcast channel, with me Nick Rothwell. In this episode I talk to Roland Lamb, founder and CEO of ROLI, makers of the Seaboard multidimensional touch sensitive keyboard instruments, and the driving force behind MPE, MIDI polyphonic expression.
So Roland, thank you very much for joining us. Great to talk to you about all things ROLI.
Roland Lamb
Nick, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be on this podcast and to have the opportunity to talk a little bit about, you know, the products that we've been developing over the last years. Okay. I'm going to assume that our readership kind of know about Roli, certainly if they've read the reviews and kind of know the kind of products you do, but I guess it'd be useful to kind of know where this all came from and what kind of led you to your first product.
And I guess what led you to decide that your first product was Roli? More than just a cool idea and actually something that you could actually make and, and commercialize. That's a great question. And in my case, it wasn't actually that I had a business and then was looking for a product. I thought of an idea of the seaboard.
I thought of something I wanted to create, and that became the inspiration and reason for starting a business in the first place. And You know, today, I think it'd be nice to take the opportunity to tell some of the stories in the background, you know, around these products, but also some of the ideas that inspired our products, because all of our products have come from ideas, cultural inspiration points, and philosophical reflections.
And usually, these are things that we wouldn't, um, You know, talk about in much depth, uh, but it might be interesting for some of the readership who, you know, are familiar with our products to just understand where they came from. So in the case of the Seaboard, um, it came from my own personal desire to be able to sing.
I grew up playing the piano, um, from when I was a small child, and and became pretty fluent as a keyboard player. And I always wished that I could sing and that I could express myself both kind of directly from the heart and intuitive ways, but also I love the subtlety of pitch control that great singers are capable of, the kind of expression that comes from that.
And I had played a bit of saxophone and double bass and the ways in which touch and gesture. You know, embouchure impact sound was something I found very attractive and obviously, you know, the way that you strike a piano key does make a difference in terms of how you play. But one day, um, after I had come to the Royal College of Art to study design, I was sitting at the piano in the cafe and playing the blues and thinking about, um, kind of blues licks and different gestures that you play on the piano where you might slide from the black key onto the white key and the ways in which those kinds of licks create almost the feeling of pitch bend and I had read somewhere that Thelonious Monk said he was looking for the space between the black and white keys and, you know, he would often play those, um, little, you know, chromatic licks.
uh, chords where he would, you know, hit, hit a, hit a, um, chromatic inversion or move between, um, two pitches very quickly to create the feeling of a bend or a slide. And I thought that was a cool idea musically. And so sitting at the piano that day, I thought, why can't I control it with a gesture. Why can't I strike a key and then move my finger left to right or push the key in some way and, um, change the pitch.
And at first it was a, it was a musical and gestural idea that was looking for a physical and material form. And one of the things that had, you know, That I'd spent a lot of time on in advance of, um, coming up with the idea for the seaboard, was philosophy. I studied Chinese and Sanskrit comparative philosophy, and my interest was in ontology, and a particular area of ontology called myriology, which is studying the relationship between wholes and parts.
And, you know, the idea, obviously, is that a series of parts is are connected in particular ways, and that's what, what makes a whole into a whole, and how nested hierarchies are developed. But these, you know, the relationship between wholes and parts takes place in time, and one of the big questions in philosophy is how to understand the difference between things and processes, or nouns and verbs, or particles and waves.
And in music, We have rhythm and harmony. And rhythm is discrete, and we have rhythmic instruments or percussive instruments where you play discrete notes, which are like particles. And then we have, um, You know, more harmonic and melodic instruments where you can change a note continuously in real time.
And the piano is interesting because it's a rhythmic instrument, a percussive instrument, because it has so many notes you can play with. You can create kind of pixelated harmonies. You can create the impression, like Thelonious Monk did, of moving between pitches based on how you actually gesturally interact with the piano.
And so, I started to think, You know, maybe there would be a way to create a new kind of keyboard, which would connect the percussive capabilities of a piano. With the harmonic and continuous capabilities of something like a cello. And because I was thinking about particles and waves, I drew a keyboard, you know, looking at it from the front.
And then I started to like shave off the tops of the black keys and make them, you know, continuously move into. where the white keys would be, and I came out with this design that had two kind of waves. And the idea is that if you play on the, the top, um, parts of the waves, you're playing the notes as you would with a piano.
But if you slide, uh, you know, through the waves and move along the waves, then you would be, um, moving the pitch continuously. And As soon as I drew that picture, I became so excited, like that I'd had a breakthrough. I felt, like, immediately, like, okay, there's an idea there that's really important. And I was actually in a very small, um, hotel room in Delhi at the time.
And I started furiously drawing pictures. pictures of the seaboard just on paper and then creating videos of myself like wiggling my hands back and forth on these pieces of paper and, and, and, and, you know, little videos to show the interaction. And I would sort of sing along with them. Cause I mean, I, I wasn't, I wasn't an engineer and, um, and as a result of that, I, Completely forgot that I was supposed to be flying back to London that day, and I missed my flight, but I had the idea for the seaboard, um, uh, and all these little, um, drawings and, and, and videos.
And then I came back to London and set myself the task of trying to figure out how to make it a reality. Okay, it's good to hear that story, and it's good to hear a story that kind of starts rooted in culture and kind of heads into technology and implementation rather than as being a purely technological.
I guess that's true of most instruments, but it's good that there's that kind of really deep cultural rooting there, which kind of was your first inspiration. And I guess also what's interesting is, I mean, one thing that strikes you about ROLI is you haven't kind of gone out of your way to invent some crazy new MIDI controller or music controller, because the history of controllers is littered with failed experiments like that.
And you're still kind of rooted in a thing that resonates with the piano. And identifies with the piano, and yet is somehow something more. Absolutely. And actually, as a total coincidence, I just happen to have on my desk right now a book by Donald Norman, which is called The Psychology of Everyday Science.
It's a good one, yes, I know it well. And, oh, you know it well. Well, then it's exactly, you know, um, it's very apropos of this conversation because, you know, the theory is that, If you completely redesign something, even if you make it theoretically more logical, like for example, isometric layout is something, um, you know, which people have explored a lot with keyboard, and you would think it would be easier because you would only have to learn one key, and then you could transpose, you know, into all keys.
But because of the deep cultural familiarity With the piano keyboard and its layout and all the music that has been written and all the teaching that happens and, um, even just the fact of millions of people who have the muscle memory to play that instrument, that turns out to be more powerful, you know, than the abstract idea of the layout or the technology and I've come over the years of, you know, developing new instruments to believe that Instruments really are cultural objects.
In fact, an instrument is defined 90 to 95 percent by the culture that surrounds it, the music that's been written for it, the people who know how to play it, the conversations that happen, and only 5 percent by the physical object itself. Like, that's just a small component of what an instrument really is.
And so, what What I was fortunate about the idea of the seaboard is that it was a branch. off of the piano and keyboard tree. And I could kind of graft it on to an existing, you know, powerful dialogue and discourse that had existed in the culture for hundreds of years. Whereas I think in almost every single case, with very rare exceptions, anyone who has ever tried to create a new instrument de novo And the, the kind of overall tree of musical instruments actually only has a few branches on it.
There are only a few families of instruments, and those families are closely related. I mean, you look at a saxophone and an oboe and a clarinet, those are very closely related instruments in terms of, you know, the fingering and the position and the embouchure, and there's a lot of, you know, relationship between them.
You see the same thing with string instruments and with horns and obviously with keyboards. So, um, yeah, it was, in a way, it was lucky that I just happened to have this idea that was related to the piano and captured that layout, uh, but also offered something new. So I guess in a purely practical sense, it means you can give a seaboard to a piano player and they can kind of play it, maybe not well for, you know, until a bit of practice, but it's not completely unknown to them.
Yeah, that's true. Um, and it definitely is a good jumping off place, I think of the seaboard as being like, um, surfing and, you know, playing the keyboard, like maybe riding a skateboard. So it's, it's a similar, you know, muscle memory. It's a sort of similar concept, but obviously you have to, um, experience.
the differences as well and master kind of a new vernacular. And one of the things that we've learned over the years is that a seaboard is related to a keyboard, but in a sense, it's really not a keyboard. It doesn't have keys and it is unfamiliar and it requires a different playing technique. And I think a lot of people who have just tried to play it like a piano or like a piano plus a little bit actually haven't gotten the full, you know, um, capabilities of the seaboard because in a way it requires a different approach, or a different thought process, a different technique.
Okay, so could you maybe talk through a bit about turning the seaboard idea into an actual product, like the materials and the construction and so on? How much of an ordeal was that? Turning the seaboard into a product was an extraordinarily difficult journey. And this was partly because I was totally inexperienced.
You know, when I invented the Seaboard, I had never really played on a synthesizer before. I had never worked in a DAW before. I was just an acoustic jazz piano player. Um, and so everything, even MIDI was new to me. And I had to start learning about how those protocols worked, how the, you know, Existing tools and technologies were constructed.
And I wasn't an engineer. I'd never done software or hardware or design. I really came at it from a, um, a different perspective and angle. And first, you know, as I said, I drew pictures of the seaboard on a piece of paper and then Would move my hands along it and kind of sing as I would go to fake it. And then I created, you know, over a long period of time, prototypes, like just trying different things.
And, um, I tried making it out of sort of foam mattress material and I tried making it out of capacitive bent glass. And then I found that I could make it out of this soft silicon material that was used in, um, In creating like masks for movies and I would then like dub, I figured out how in logic to record and kind of dub the sound that I was imagining for the seaboard over the videos, so it was completely like starting with this like a vaporware like approach gradually.
Then I. You know, began to learn about hardware and about software, and I created PCBs, um, you know, little circuit boards, and I learned about, um, how to, you know, create kind of the basic code to run the Cboard, and I worked in the environment in Logic, because during this period I discovered that, um, You couldn't really use MIDI because the Seaboard had to be a polyphonic expressive instrument and MIDI wasn't well suited for that.
So in, in the environment I would go in and create many, many different channels and sort of send one note per channel and find this hack like workaround for managing MIDI. But even once I got to the point of, you know, Building a complete working prototype with which I could demo the capability and each little breakthrough was very exciting You know, I make it work and then I would be able to create these pitch bands and sort of see this Idea come to life, but even once I had built quite a good working prototype I was still years away from a product because you know a proof of concept prototype is a Relatively easy to build, you know, you just have to try different things and you can kind of show that something is possible.
But going from that to a high quality, well integrated product that you can ship to people is, is a whole nother challenge. And the biggest challenge there was that with an instrument like the Seaboard, Really what you're trying to do is integrate closely many different disciplines. So there's the material science of the, um, key waves, as we call them, and there's the sensor integration, and then the firmware, and then the firmware goes into the software, and the software has to go into a sound engine.
And all of these components have to be closely integrated. And when I was building the initial prototypes, Each individual component was very poorly executed because I was doing it myself and I didn't know anything about any of the disciplines. But they were very closely integrated because the integration was happening in my brain.
Then I got people excited about the Seaboard and, you know, raised some money and I hired a bunch of domain experts. So suddenly the execution of each individual element was very good. But what I found was I had no idea about how to get all of these people and pieces to integrate into one thing. So then I had to learn a little bit about product development and project management and program management and really just how teams work well together.
Cause it went from being something I was working on as a solo inventor to suddenly being a leader of a team. And I had no idea how to do that either. And then gradually over time, a lot of the great people that I've had a chance to work with, helped to teach me. How to integrate products and Years later we came out with the first seaboard and we started shipping it around the world so it was really exhilarating to get great reviews and to get great feedback and for people to Really see the value in this new instrument because it was a very very long time coming Okay, so the first product was I forgot name was it was it called the grand or the stage the full size seaboard Was that the first product you shipped?
So the first product that we shipped was the Seaboard Grand LFE, which stood for Limited First Edition. We made only 88 of them, and they cost 8, 888 pounds and 88 pence. And then we went on to ship the other Grands, including the Um, the Seaboard Grants stage and the Seaboard Grants studio, which I believe were 36 and 61 keys, respectively.
Okay, and you talked about these being integrated, so the sound engine was essentially built into the instruments then? That's right. A very early version of Equator was built into the instrument with a simple interface. And this was in part because I wanted to establish the ambition. For the seaboard to be seen as a musical instrument first, and a controller second.
You know, Seaboard obviously is a great controller, and it's a very pragmatic way to use an instrument like the Seaboard. But I wanted to create something that would be very stable, because I knew that for musicians, the Seaboard would be something that they'd have to practice and study and learn. And in that case, you don't necessarily want to have thousands and thousands of different presets to play around with.
You want to have a few very good presets that you can actually learn to master. Okay, but then I guess in subsequent Years following on that, you've kind of branched out into separating the controllers from a growing set of VST instruments. So you've got F expansion on board, so you came, came in with Cypher and Strobe and the various other things there, as well as Equator 2 and the, what's it called, ROLI Studio Player and Studio Drums, I believe.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, this was in part because I wildly underestimated how difficult the sound challenges would be, you know, with the seaboard. Not just challenges, but the kind of opportunity because what I didn't realize at the time was that It wasn't just a problem of MIDI, but that sound engines themselves had been designed around keyboards and MIDI based control, and that typically, you know, you might have a control around, you know, your initial velocity, if you, you know, would allow you to control aftertouch or mod or like pitch bend with a wheel.
But essentially, these were not designed as controllers. continuous synthesis engines. They were designed as one off synthesis, synthesis engines. And to create good quality, expressive, continuous synthesis that could map naturally to human gestures, you needed a different kind of mod matrix, and you needed a different form of experimentation, and that it would be a long form of experimentation.
And one thing that I read as I was developing the Seaboard did. you know, was comforting, I guess, was that even the piano forte took decades to get refined. And initially when the piano forte launched, um, it got very poor reviews because people said it was unplayable. They were used to playing harpsichords or organs that just are like on off with no velocity control.
And early reviewers said no one will ever really be able to control a piano well enough. And I'm sure some of that was to do with the quality of the actions that they had with the initial pianos, but some was just the unfamiliarity of the concept. And so, One of the strategic reasons that we moved towards controllers and working with, you know, um, soft synths was that it was a much more flexible environment rather than an embedded system with which to experiment, you know, develop sounds, let our community develop sounds.
And really begin to understand the territory around what makes a multidimensional polyphonic expressive sound work. And so that, that's proven to be good. I think the other, the good strategy, the other thing though, that's interesting about this is that, um, on the one hand, most of what has happened with the Seaboard has, been a very lucky and, you know, wonderful realization of the dreams that I had for this instrument.
But in some cases, you put something out into the world and then it is interpreted differently than you intend. And what I didn't realize or expect was that in addition to using the seaboard as a real time musical instrument, that many thousands of producers and creators would enjoy. using it almost as a experimental palette for sound.
And a lot of those people who are using the Seaboard as a kind of new expressive experimental palette for sound and for controlling sound naturally work in DAWs and in a production environment. And so they will want to connect the Seaboard to all their different soft synths. So then I made it my mission to try to support that process through the development of the MPE protocol.
Okay, so I was going to come on to that. So MPE is, in some sense, it's just a, it is straight MIDI. It's a, it's kind of using the MIDI language, the MIDI protocol in its standard form, but it's a particular interpretation of it such that if your instruments and your DAW is set up correctly, it'll respond polyphonically to what you call the five degrees of movement.
Is that right? That's right, the five dimensions of touch. And, um, Interestingly, MPE is exactly the hack that I did in the logic environment with my first prototypes. It, it, you simply set up many different channels, and then you have the notes move around those different channels, and so you're using, you know, the capabilities within MIDI.
To go beyond MIDI, but it's an, the main thing about it is that it's a system that works if everyone agrees on exactly how the hack should work. And so the project with MPE was about working with a number of different industry stakeholders to really formalize the detail of how it should be set up and how it should be implemented so that everyone used it in exactly the same way.
And it's been really wonderful to see that happen. And as a result of that, to see the new innovations that it's made possible. It was very nice to see it arriving in, I think I saw it in Big Studio first. I think it had pretty solid implementation. Then Ableton Live came along and put it in a few years later.
So it's good to see it's kind of bedded down. And excited to even see it in, in Push as well, you know, to see that other, you know, hardware now has that capability built into it. So, you know, my hope was always that the Cboard would help to open up a new space around expressive electronic instruments. And whether it's Ableton Push or, you know, the, um, new Osmos device, you know, there's a lot of new great instruments, hardware and software that are implementing MPE in some terrific ways.
And, you know, so that's been a really, really satisfying thing to see. And hopefully as and when we kind of migrate to MIDI 2. 0, we'll kind of still see that degree of, let's say, conformity to the spec, so that we can just kind of interchange. I think so. I think so. I think that we have a great foothold now, and it will certainly be something that people will want and expect in all future versions of MIDI as well.
Okay, so let's, let's roll forward a few years, and you kind of went small, I guess you could call it, from the full size C boards into the Blocks ecosystem. Could you tell us something about that? Yeah, so Continuing on with the, you know, vein that we started of, of talking about some of the stories and some of the philosophical inspirations and cultural inspirations.
Even when I was first thinking about the seaboard, I was thinking about, I was actually thinking of two ideas. One idea was, can I make this instrument that sits between like percussion and harmony, you know, that's, um, a particle in a wave, so to speak. But the other idea that I had was, can I make an instrument that you can personalize to you?
That, you know, that can be modular. And whenever you look at a studio, there's lots of different components. And actually, I like to paint as well. And so Painters think a lot about their palettes and the colors that they mix on the palette. Sometimes they like to work with a restricted palette, and sometimes they like to work with an extended palette.
And I think musicians are the same. They like to collect different elements for their palettes. Actually, the other art form I really love is collage. And my grandmother was a collage artist, and she had a beautiful studio where she had collages. Basically, her whole life, she had collected different kinds of pieces of paper from all of her travels, and then she would put them together in her pieces of art.
I think this is how musicians work. They have their hardware elements, they have their software, they have their tricks, they have their chords. And so, but the problem with it is that it makes it so that music can be hard to get into, and it can be hard to move around, and you end up being kind of glued to this bigger studio setup with lots of different components and a lot of complexity.
So I said, can we retain the kind of ability for personalization and make something that just clicks together instantly where you can build the instrument you want or the components you want put it in your backpack use it with your mobile phone and that was really the inspiration for blocks was like this very personal instant mobile way to create the production device that was for you and that you wanted.
And if that happened to be two seaboards, that's great. Or seaboard and a light pad block or, you know, a Lumi keys unit. And, you know, it's been then very interesting to see the parts of that proposition that have really worked and the parts of that proposition that we have wanted to develop even further, you know, over the years.
I guess because after the light pad came the light pad M, And, as we'll talk about shortly, after the Seaborg Block came the Seaborg Block M. So there's kind of a sense of revision and refinement there. So, I guess, after the Blocks, you came on to the Lumi, which was aimed more at the educational market, would you say?
Yeah, well, you know, Lumi, interestingly, is used for, about half by people doing using it for production and performance and half by people who are learning. And initially we developed Lumi as a MP based keyboard that would give you more feedback and like with Roli Studio, for example, allow you to create chords and arpeggiate in an intuitive way because we've always wanted to create products that are very intuitive and great for exploration.
But Early on in the process with Lumi, it became clear that some of the most powerful use cases would be for learning, because people found it really accessible and simple, um, and so we started exploring software that would allow people to kind of take an intuitive, easy, and fun music learning journey, um, in a, in a plug and play format, and that was really the foundation for the Lumi Music app.
And there's a whole ecosystem there as well, so you licensed music in score form so that people could learn to play it, I believe? That's right. And also, we came up with a cool system. It was really built around progressive learning because we wanted to make it as easy to learn as playing a game. And so there's like a cascade mode where the notes come down to a bit like they would in Guitar Hero.
But the difference with Lumi is that, you know, in order to play the game, you're actually playing a keyboard. It's not just, you know, buttons. And then you can step by step go from there all the way up towards reading music. And we wanted to make it so that each step was a very gradual, small, accessible step.
Okay, and then I guess, was it a year or so ago, you kind of swung back to more the professional end of the market with a new version of the Seaboard Rise, the Rise 2? That's right, and this was really exciting because I think in the first, you know, few product lines that we developed, whether it was the Grand with the integrated sound engine or the Rise, you know, it was our first Seaboard controller.
or the block system, you know, to personalize, you know, and all the different kinds of philosophical ideas that were built into these. It was really about imagining the future of what music could be like, of new ways that people could create, of trying to come up with very new and fresh ideas. And once we had done that and built kind of momentum around that, um, we've now had the opportunity to go back and work more on the iteration side.
And, you know, in the case of, um, the Seaboard Block M, now we've just improved the ruggedness of the product. We've added in a MIDI out port. We've made it into, like, a better overall experience. Um, we've improved also the software capabilities around Dashboard. And with RISE 2, similarly, We didn't feel that there were a lot of changes we wanted to make.
We wanted to make small changes. And my focus was actually on the playing surface and the playability. And I wanted to make a seaboard that would be good for playing faster and more precisely. Um, you know, because actually I always like to play the seaboard in its full legato mode, you know, we have aspects of the seaboard where you control in software, um, the ability to make the notes kind of round, but when you do that, you lose some of the full kind of continuous pitch movement ability, which is what makes the seaboard great, but you also never really want to be playing out of tune, and so we found that these precision frets that we put on the seaboard rise, really help people to feel where they were on the key.
And part of this was because, you know, through a bit of the research that we had done, we found that any kind of visual feedback is not sufficient in musical instruments for you to adapt your muscle memory. You need tactile feedback because your, you know, tactile sensation feedback loop is much faster and you can actually develop your muscle memory to adapt to that.
So. It was a small change, but we felt it was a very important change. Okay, so you mentioned the Seaboard Block M, which is the latest product. It's nice to see that the Block's getting some love, as it were, because I was a great fan of the Block's ecosystem, and I've got, I think, four Seaboard Blocks sitting here, in various versions, in various states of disrepair.
So it's nice to see that coming back. So is that a commitment again to the Block's ecosystem and what it represents? Yes. It is actually. And, you know, it's an opportunity for us to, you know, explore that territory again with all the experience that we have the first time, you know, to make it more robust, to think about, um, the overall software integration pathway.
And we've got some pretty exciting innovations, you know, on that front. And it's great to hear that you've got four C board blocks, but let's try to make sure that they're all in a perfect state of repair, because then you'll have, um, if I'm not mistaken, a 96 key C board. Yep, fitting on a desk, which is really nice.
Okay, super. Well, thanks very much for that. So I think that brings us up to date. I'm waiting to get hold of a, the new block M, so I can kind of put it through its paces. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for talking to us. And yeah, we look forward to seeing what role you come up with in the future.
Well, thank you so much, Nick. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's great to get to talk with you and we'll be sure to get you a Cboard Blockcam soon. And hopefully sometime soon we can have you over to the studio and show you some of the new products and developments. Looking forward to it. Thanks very much.
Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the Shownotes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all the other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.
This has been a Project Castiel production by me, Nick Rothwell, for Sound On Sound. Music Music Music
