| re -.1:
When I was shopping for my Rhodes M660, I was told that
essentially, the 'Roland' and 'Rhodes' cards were the same ones except
for the labels and supposedly, the price (the Rhodes cards carried a
higher price tag). When people got wind of this, the Rhodes cards
started to lose their popularity (when I say Roland cards, I mean those
designed for the U-20, i.e. the DN-Uxxxx ones, I think). I don't recall
whether the salesman said the Rhodes cards were still available, but he
did say that the Roland cards did basically the same thing. One reason
I posted the note was to find out the extent of the compatability
without having to risk the $60 (Canadian) per card. It's such a foreign
concept to run into what might actually be an honest salesman that you
want to check things out yourself.
Also, thanks for the reply.
Cal C.
|
| I have been using a Roland Rhodes (88-key version) for over a year
now. I use it as the Mother in my rig. I use it only for piano
(presets).
Cal - you mention cards for it. I have not seen any voices other than
the factory ones, and I havn't seen an Editor/Librarian (Atari-ST) yet.
I would be interested in any voices. I have managed to send a Brain-dump
Request via my sequencer (Notator), and receive the dump OK. This means
that I could exchange the Sysex bulkdump onto midifile. Can you do
this ?
The sound-generating architecture seems to be strange - rather
different from other Roland machines, so I'd be interested to hear
how good a job it makes of, say, slap-bass as you mention.
Overall, I'm very happy with this machine, but it wasn't cheap [approx
1400 pounds, after argy-bargy]. My criticisms centre on the stupid
locations of the pitch-wheel and LED contrast controls - these wouldn't
last one week's gigging. If you want to gig with this, then you'd
better get a good flightcase. Also, it's almost as heavy and just as
awkward as the old (Fender) Rhodes, although the M660 shouldn't be too bad.
That's the problem with weighted keyboards, I'm afraid.
I configured it for gigging (an infrequent occasion for me), to hook up
to my MT32. I layer the MT32 on top of the piano for about 20 of the
Rhodes program changes. This works great - hit a (Rhodes) program, and
it sends out a prog-change on a selected Midi channel (to the MT32). I
arranged the key-zoning such that some prog-changes layer the MT32
voice over a predefined key zone; eg. l/hand, r/hand, mid-keyboard,
etc. It's a pity that it couldn't transpose the stuff it outputs to the
MT32, without transposing the piano sounds too.
Regards,
Jim Burke
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