The FANTOM 7 EX is a powerful tool - loaded with great sounds and lots of hands-on control capability. Although it may not be as intuitive to use as Roland's marketing indicates, it doesn't take a lot of time with the reference manual to figure things out.

For all things studio or stage this machine can do it all, and in a single tough hardware unit to boot. Any acoustic or synthetic sound you could need is at your disposal, well catalogued, and can be manipulated to your heart's content - and if it's not you can either download it from Roland Cloud or wait for them to add it in a later expansion. The synth engines, that's "engines" plural, are very deep but intuitive to craft with. I personally like the nZyme engine the best and I think it's a seriously underrated wavetable synth that Roland has created, at least compared to the rest of their signature catalog that we're all used to. The keys feel just right, the buttons have the right touch, every function on the touch screen has a button equivalent you can press where needed, the scene workflow is intuitive as a branching system, and the controller possibilities for MIDI and CV gear gives you a lot of options to work with other gear as needed. This thing should last a long time.

Note that I technically bought the vanilla Fantom 7 with the EX software upgrade, which effectively equates to this unit. Functionally they are the same, the only difference cosmetically is the added "EX" decal on the left face.

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