The new Roland DJ-707M is the connoisseur’s DJ Controller

The new Roland DJ-707M is the connoisseur’s DJ Controller

Don’t be fooled by the new Roland DJ-707M’s rather minimal aesthetic, it’s an absolute powerhouse under the hood.

With a large portion of the DJ controller market being represented by huge, flashy DJ controllers with high-resolution screens and jog-wheels the size of turntables – the new Roland DJ-707M attempts to be something different. It still sports a large number of the features that we see on the bigger flagship controllers, however in a very compact form-factor with most of the essential functions being available immediately on the front-panel.

The Roland DJ-707M takes a more practical approach to the design, offering smaller jog-wheels and pitch fader without skimping on the build-quality. with most of the more advanced functions hidden away with shift-functions. The controller features the normal eight Serato performance pads per deck, with various modes. They’ve also simplified the FX section into a single parameter control and three on/off switches, to make the overall controller more compact.

The Roland DJ-707M features a four-channel standalone mixer, each channel has built-in Filter and FX controllers and the usual three-band EQ. You can even use the controller as your interface and mixer in a DVS setup, although the Serato DVS upgrade sells separately.

Some of the more advanced and hidden features…

The Roland DJ-707M has some rather nifty “hidden” features – channel 3 has an internal Roland TR drum machine and channel 4 has an “Oscillator” mode, each of which are controlled using the performance pads and can be layered into your mix for live remixes.

The controller has a simple but very nifty screen which displays various settings from track information to configuration options. The controller features a unique feature for DJ controllers, which I think will be very handy for the mobile DJs – Scene Mode. The Roland DJ-707M has a variety of outputs, main outputs, booth and zone outputs. The Scene Mode allows you to configure which channels are playing to which outputs – for example, you could have an aux input playing a backtrack to a seperate zone at a venue, while you concentrate on mixing on the main system. There are 10 scenes to configure and switch between, so you can set up for a variety of different environments beforehand – very intuitive.

The microphone channels are extensive, from gain and level control, three-band EQ and a set of vocal FX, like I mentioned there’s an aux input for hooking up a synth or drum machine – and the controller even has MIDI output to sync up the clock of your devices. It’s got dual USB for seamless DJ changeovers or backup laptops, and dual headphones for those duo acts.

The Roland DJ-707M is set to retail at USD $999 (around R15k excl. duties), not bad for a controller with so many features! For more information check out the Roland website here.