Roland Aira P-6 Sampler Review: Great Sound, Complicated Interface

It took a long time for Roland to make a serious play in the portable budget synth space that Korg supercharged with its Volca lineup. One thing that had been missing from the Aira Compact series until now, however, was a sampler.

Considering Roland is behind the iconic SP-404, it seemed a foregone conclusion that, eventually, the company would build a scaled-down version for its Compact line. The P-6 Creative Sampler is the inevitable marriage of the SP-404 soul and Aira Compact form factor. If you’ve been eyeing the 404, but have been hesitant to drop $500 on one, the P-6 might seem pretty compelling. It’s tiny, packs a surprising amount of features, and costs only $220. But, as you might expect, there are some pretty significant trade-offs. I don’t hate it, but you can find easier-to-use and better-made instruments for this price, so you’ll want to read on to see if the P-6 is right for you.

An Archaic Interface

The P-6 is a surprisingly powerful and feature-rich device. Unfortunately, the limited hands-on controls are crammed into a very tiny space. This leads to a lot of finger gymnastics and basically demands you keep the manual handy.

Roland’s Aira Compact line continues to have perhaps the most infuriating interface I’ve ever encountered in a musical instrument. The four-character, seven-segment display is almost inexcusable in 2024. Just give us a display that we can understand.

While picking a sample and placing it in the step sequencer is simple enough, most more advanced features require some combination of button presses and/or deciphering obtuse menus. For example, if you want to tweak the filter on a sample, you need to press shift and the filter button (G# on the keyboard). The knob labeled Start then controls the cutoff, which is relatively easy to figure out, since when you turn the knob you see a big letter C. But I had to look in the manual to figure out what the CTRL1 knob does. Turning it displays what looks like a Y but I think is actually supposed to be a K, since apparently it changes key tracking.

Even things like copying and pasting steps is unnecessarily convoluted. First, you need to press Record, then select what you want to copy either by turning the main encoder or holding down the appropriate step. Then you need to hold down the KYBD button and press Menu, then turn the main encoder to copy, then press enter. Easy? Not really. To paste that step you need to do the same process except turn the encoder to select paste (PSTE) before hitting enter.

Surprisingly Powerful

Using the P-6 can be mildly infuriating at times, but if you can come to grips with its interface, then you might be pleasantly surprised by what it’s capable of.

At its most basic, it’s a bread-and-butter sampler that captures mono samples of up to six seconds at 44.1 kHz (or three seconds in stereo). With 48 total sample slots, that amounts to 285 seconds, or a bit shy of five minutes. There are samplers with more storage, but that should be enough to keep you busy making tracks for a while.

Frankly, things are a lot more interesting if you start lowering the sample rate. This gets you more sample time, but also something a bit more characterful. While you can go all the way down to 11.025 kHz (23.7 seconds per pad/19 minutes total in mono), I think the sweet spot is 14.7 kHz. This gets you some lovely digital crunch without introducing so much noise and aliasing that your recordings sound like they were made on a greeting card. Then again, I like the option to go low: Sometimes that extreme level of digital lo-fi is exactly what you need.

In addition to crunching your samples into digital oblivion, you can process them with a ton of different effects like reverb, delay, a multi-mode filter, and most importantly, a vinyl simulator for that true 404 flavor. The six sample pads across the front aren’t velocity-sensitive, but they’re large and responsive enough to do some basic finger drumming.

Unfortunately, chopping a sample spreads it across the smaller keyboard on the bottom, rather than the larger sample pads. Those keys are tiny, mushy, and unpleasant to play. Still, if you want something small for tossing together lo-fi or boom-bap beats on the go, the P-6 isn’t a bad choice.

A Tiny Tool Kit

When building a beat, you’ve got quite a lot of tools at your disposal. You can place steps manually using the step sequencer, or play them in live to keep things off the grid. You’ve got 64 steps to work with, plus probability, sub-steps, micro-timing, and motion recording to add complexity and variety.

Then, once your loop is ready, you can use a handful of effects to create on-the-fly builds, breakdowns, and fills. Most notably there are Scatter, Step Loop, and the ​​DJFX Looper borrowed from the SP-404.

Scatter is divisive, to say the least. It adds stutter and glitch effects based on preprogrammed patterns. It can sound OK when used sparingly and with the right settings, but it is anything but subtle and can turn more complex and melodic beats into unlistenable chaos.

Step Loop simply loops the steps you hold down on the sequencer. It’s a more flexible and interesting take on the sort of beat repeat effects you can find on other devices like the Teenage Engineering PO-133. It’s great for creating live fills and variations while jamming. It’s truly one of my favorite performance features on any piece of music gear, and I’d love to see it on more stuff.

The DJFX Looper sounds simple on its surface, but is quite powerful once you master it. There are three parameters you have control over. One changes the size of the chunk of audio to be looped, the second changes the speed and direction of playback, and the third simply turns the looper on and off. When used properly, you can create tape-stop effects, beat repeats, quiet breakdowns, and even ring mod-esque glitchiness. It’s one of the cornerstones of lo-fi hip hop and the SP-404, so it’s a big deal that it’s here.

It’s worth mentioning that the P-6 also has a surprisingly decent granular synth inside of it. Granular is a sample-based form of synthesis. (Greatly simplified: It chops a sound file into little bits, rearranges them, and spits them back out.) So it’s not a huge stretch for any sampler to be used for granular. But, hardware granular synths still aren’t particularly common. The P-6 isn’t the best granular synth on the market, though it does a decent enough job of creating those glitchy clouds that are its hallmark. Plus, it gives you one more way to create melody and harmony without just playing back one-shots.

This is a shockingly powerful and feature-rich device for a $220 sampler that you can stash in a pair of cargo shorts. The problem? It’s a bit like a pocket knife with too many tools inside. It’s far more capable than the Elektron Model:Samples or the Teenage Engineering PO-133, both of which cost $100 more, but I find those instruments much more fun, and that’s kind of a big reason to make music. The P-6 just feels too complicated for its own good.

If portability is a priority and the ability to do double duty as a granular synth excites you, the P-6 could very well be worth the money. I’d definitely choose it over the Korg Volca Sample if I was on a budget, though I’d probably choose Teenage Engineering’s $99 PO-33 over both. In general, though, I think most would be better off saving up a little bit more and springing for either the PO-133 or Roland’s SP-404MKII, both of which are more intuitive. Intuition and ease of use, in my opinion, matter a bit more in music-making than how capable your sampler is.