I think that Roland Aira series misses a lot of things that are successful about the most recent korg products. They all seem like they are trying to capture the feel of the kaossilator, kaosspad, and micro korg rather then the current line of montrons, volcas, and mini ms-20. I think it wasn’t what people had hoped for and were mislead into believing via their campaigns. The price is really high compared to the korg versions of the Aira series and several years late. The only product I can give them credit for would be the tr-8 and that is just on the fact that it’s a decent sounding hardware emulation of impossibly expensive gear for cheaper (i think the ACB technology sounds pretty good).
Rather then focus on quality, the gear that they made seems to be all about the gimmicks that other companies have already done. The VT-1 wasn’t even a particularly useful/sought after roland product but they brought it back in the VT-3 for some reason. The VT-3 has a lot of modes but serves none of them well seemingly. A simple addition of midi in to control pitch and you would a decent vocoder but they seem to have omitted that. The biggest issue is that Aira never fully commit on what their products are supposed to be. Are they a new line of affordable digital beat making equipment or are they an update to roland’s old gems? In both cases they don’t seem to really get the point across.
Aira wants to ride the reputation of past roland products without delivering on the quality that they provided and tries to pass off gimmicks and stolen ideas (touchpads, shuffle AKA beat repeats/roll/fills, bright color LEDs, etc.) as innovation. The design looks even feel late as the color scheme looks like some toys i had from the 90’s. It all comes off to me as though Roland just doesn’t know what they are doing and are either playing catchup or trying to cash in on the success of things they don’t fully understand.
