Pharrell Williams joins ROLI as Chief Creative Officer

At the Why Create? conference in London overnight, ROLI founder Roland Lamb announced that acclaimed producer, 10 x Grammy award winner, and fellow guest speaker at the event Pharrell Williams will be joining ROLI as Chief Creative Officer.

“Our mission as a company is to empower everyone to create music,” Lamb said. “We’re always looking for creative artists to work with, and Pharrell embodies creativity — not only in his music but also in many other areas like design and fashion. And he’s someone I admire and respect enormously.”
He said that he and Williams “had natural chemistry from the beginning, a real meeting of minds. As we kept talking it even turned out he had a product he’d been dreaming of that is similar to a product concept that we’ve been working on. So we thought, we’re thinking about the same things and working on the same things. Why not do it together?

What that product is has not been announced nor hinted at. But in the meantime, ROLI have released a new soundpack for the NOISE app based on Pharrell’s track ‘Happy’. It deconstructs the chords, basslines, and vocals of ‘Happy,’ giving you the raw materials to build your own song — whether you have a musical background or not. You can recreate ‘Happy’ one layer at a time. Or you can take your track in a different creative direction.

It’s free, so it’s easy to get started. Check out the demo opposite played on a Seaboard Block and a few Lightpad Blocks connected to NOISE. And download NOISE for free in the App Store.

ROLI were instrumental in coming up with the MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) spec with their Seaboard series of instruments, learn more here