| I attended a Roland clinic last night at Daddy's Junky Music in Salem,
NH. The clinic was given by Chuck Vandeman, a Roland representive.
The clinic was in a small but comfortable sound-damped room. Soft
drinks were served. Nice informal atmosphere, not any significant
pressure to buy, although they did circulate a flyer of "tonite-only
demo prices" (by the way, I hope none of you out there really believe
that they wouldn't give you those prices if you came in, say next
Tuesday!!!).
On display were: D-50, D-10, D-20, D-110, MT-32, S-550, MC-500 Mark I,
M-160 and a P-330.
The talk was divided into 3 segments based on Roland's 3 sound
generation techniques.
The first section was on Structured Adaptive Synthesis, which is the
technology Roland uses in its digital piano synths. The big news here
was the P-330, a follow-on to the MKS-20. It costs about 2/3's the
ORIGINAL price of the MKS-20 and is pretty much identical except that
it has a two band EQ (instead of 3), a MIDI overflow to gang P-330's
(and MKS-20's) together for more voices, a programmable release time
and you can stack chorus sounds. It's also a single rack space tall,
whereas I believe the MKS-20 was at least 1.5.
The SA demo was a MC-500 sequence which was Chick Coreas first
noodlings on an RD-1000. That is, it is what he played when he
first sat down to try it out. Pretty interesting stuff. You can
hear him go thru the patch changes and listening to individual notes as
well as some free-form improvisation.
The next area covered was sampling technology. Chuck stuck mostly
to the S-50, S-330 and the S-550. This seemed to annoy some of
the S-10, S-20, and S-220 owners in the audience as there seemed to
be lots of questions about "my S-10...?"
One area of confusion was clarified: the S-550 is *NOT* the S-50 in a
rack mount. The software is significantly different. The S-330
however could be described as a cut-down S-550. It runs the same
software.
Roland has released an MC-500 like sequencer as a software option for
the S-50. A similar program will be available for the S-550 and S-330
in the late-summer/early fall timeframe. It's rumored to be an MC-500
that uses the video interface to give you PC-like features. Should
be interesting.
It was very pleasing to know that if I want a better sequencer for
particular things, I *still* don't have to buy a PC. I can just
use my sampler, and what's more is that you can still use the sampler
while running the sequencer!!! Gee! No GTE... err Roland.
What really intrigues me about this is that it's a step toward the
affordable music workstation, where what the unit does (SGU, EFX,
sequencer, etc.) is a function of what software you feed it.
The demos were really awesome (I'd come to these things just to hear
the demos). The first demo was an S-550 orchestral arrangement. It
sounded very realistic and definitely production quality.
The next demo was on the S-50 and had the theme of "what you can do
when you economize memory to the max". It was an updated version
of "1-2-3 O'clock Rock" complete with (partial) Bill Hailey vocals, and many
sounds sampled directly from the original recording. It was just
"inconcievable" that the S-50 could possibly hold all those samples
PLUS the sequencer program mentioned above (yes it was running on the
S-50, but it wasn't hooked up to the video interface).
The next sound generation technology covered was (can you guess?)
LA synthesis.
Roland now has scads of LA synths. Let's see if I can cover them
from the bottom up (according to Chucks ordering) and get it right:
MT-32 - 32 voices (not really!), drum sounds (straight from the 707),
full multi-timbrality. They played an incredible demo of latin
music (probably because the latin percussion samples really are
quite good that made me want to keep my MT-32 (which I have offered
for sale).
D-110 - new rack mount version of the MT-32. Better sounds, accepts
ram cards, new drum samples, and they have provided a "solution"
to the "channel eating" problem of the MT-32 by allowing you
to "turn off" specific channels from the front panel.
D-10 Don't remember much about this, it was described as "like the D-20
but different"
D-20 Fully multi-timbral with a builtin sequencer. Clearly Rolands
attempt to get at the ESQ-1 market. It sounded good, I got the
impression that the builtin sequencer was not nearly as
sophisticated as the ESQ-1's. It looked like it was easy to use
but if the manual is a typical Roland manual (awful) it is hardly
a comfort to know that the sequencer would be easy to use if only
you had to some to learn how to use it. (More flaming about Roland
documentation later.)
Other Roland news.
A new version of the MC-500 has (or will be?) introduced. There will
be a hardware upgrade option for old units, but it's gonna cost you
a bundle, like $600. It basically replaces the motherboard. However
it's still cheaper than buying the new one outright. I wrote down
the "new" features figuring there were a few of you out there who
might be interested: 120K notes, 8 tracks up from 4, 2 MIDI outputs,
time shifting (by track, channel, event, etc), data thinning
(selective removal of pitch bend, modulation data), Rhythm track,
total time inquiry (how many minutes/secs do we have here?), improved
microscope mode, etc.
I stayed around late to talk to Chuck. I don't have time to type in
every thing we talked about, but I did complete my "mission" to
make a strong plea/case for better documentation.
I was not very encouraged by his response. Roland is in "pump out
those products" mode. According to him, customers would not want
to see less products traded for better documentation. He also
said that people often don't read the manuals, and ask him questions
that are answered in the manual. I pointed out to him, that this
may imply that they didn't understand the manual as easily as it
might imply that they didn't read it.
The bottom line is that he (made the mistake of) asking me if I
wanted good products or better documentation. The bottom line is
that I consider a good product to be both a piece of hardware
accompanied by a good manual. The manual is not "separate" from
the product. That's an unfortunate attitude.
Well, he sorta confessed that he agreed with me but indicated that it
was very unlikely that things would change.
I told him, they'd have to. The average thickness of music equipment
manuals is increasing, and so is their importance with the advances
in technology. At some point, the gap between Roland's documentation
and their hardware is gonna be so large as to overshadow the quality
of the hardware.
I told him that the D-20 looked like a nice piece of equipment but that
if some non-technical musician comes up to me and asks "what should
I get, the D-20 or the ESQ-1?", I would immediately answer the ESQ-1.
This is solely on the basis of the manual. I do not believe most of
my non-Digital musical friends are interested in slogging thru the
Roland manual when they can breeze thru then Ensoniq manual. I think
most of them would get frustrated with the D-20 manual and not end
up enjoying this hobby in the way that I have come to.
I made it clear that it was not my intention to laud Ensoniq over
the Roland rep, but that I felt that it was an important point they'd
have to see.
The nice thing was that the people from Daddy's were listening to all
this nodding their heads after each sentence. Now as I said, I'm
sure Chuck agreed; my hope was that it would motivate him to bring it
all back as feedback.
Tidbits, Chuck said that Roland IS coming out with a keyboard that
transmits polyphonic after-touch in "a few months".
db
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