The Roland U220 – My Favorite ROMpler

Ah, this is the first rack-mounted sample playback unit I ever owned, and I still have two of them here in the studio today.

The Roland U220 Sound Module

These type of units were known as ROMplers because they came preloaded (in ROM memory) with all the sample libraries it needed to make up its patches. You could also expand some of them with ROM cards that added new samples and new patches. The U220 has two of these slots. (I believe there was a library of about 12 different cards available.)

Some of the sounds are classics that I still use today. Some of my favorites are the piano, the overdriven B3 organ, the muted trumpet, the soprano sax, the smooth tenor sax and the Benny Hill-ish, honky, rock-n-roll tenor sax. Another handy thing was that it had 30-voice polyphony for all these voices.

There were two great playback demos in the U220. Here are both of them for your listening pleasure.

Now, this one has a couple of interesting tidbits I have to point out. First, the bass line is cool and demonstrates the unit’s ability to set different pitch bend values for bending up and bending down. Second, this demo was created by Eric Persing, the genius behind all the Spectrasonics plugins; Omnisphere, Stylus RMX and Trillian (formerly Trilogy). I wish this guy would put out a whole album!

You can pick up a U220 on the used market for just a couple of hundred bucks these days. It’s well worth a look if you’re thinking about adding to your rack!

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