Like our sun, you shouldn’t stare directly at this for any length of time.

Feel free to comment on any of the models you can recognize before you pass out.

A Brief History Of ALL Roland Synthesizers? is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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“I figured from your web site, you might have come across the Roland KR 33 piano. Are the keys weighted or not?”

No Mario, the Roland KR-33 does not have weighted keys. It has 76 synth-style keys that are velocity sensitive.

“There is another Roland model said to have weighted keys (76) EP 7 II. Any idea if it produces a classical piano sound as well? (That’s what I am after.)”

This is the official feature breakdown:

The ep-7mkII has a 76-note velocity-sensitive, weighted keyboard and eight CD-quality instrument sounds for creating life-like performances that can be stored on the built-in four song recorder.

Features:

* 76 semi-weighted keys with touch sensitivity
* Built-in stereo sound system with two 5″ speakers
* Onboard digital reverb and chorus effects
* Dual headphone jacks for silent listening by two players or teacher and student
* Optional “console” type stand specifically for the EP7 and EP7mkII

Here’s a close up of the sounds available. You’ll note there are two different piano sounds available. On most Roland gear, these are typically a classical oriented piano and a jazz/pop/rock piano.

I hope this helps you with your search!

A Question About Roland Digital Pianos is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. The Roland KR-33 Digital Piano – Sleeping Giant
2. Akai X7000 Question From Carl
3. My Old Friend, The Roland D50

“Hi, 2 questions…I’m a ‘Cars’ fan and was wondering if you knew if Greg Hawkes used this keyboard? Would you happen to know if the long sweep sound that opens for the Cars “Moving in Stereo” was used on this?”

Bill, I don’t know.

If anyone knows the answer to this and would like to help Bill out and satisfy my curiosity too, leave a comment!

A Question About the Roland SH-1000 is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. Akai X7000 Question From Carl
2. Roland SH-1000 Synth – Get Your Analog On!
3. A Question About Roland Digital Pianos

Hi Al,

Came across your 11/19/09 post on the Akai X7000.

I have one and 25 sampler discs that I’m looking to sell. Would you be interested or would you know someone who is?

My asking price is $ 450.

I’m not in the market for one right now, but if anyone out there is, please leave a comment and include how Carl can get ahold of you.

Note: I do not know Carl and I cannot offer any endorsement or guarantee of either his character or the quality of the gear he is offering for sale.

Akai X7000 Keyboard Sampler

Akai X7000 Question From Carl is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. The Akai X7000 – One Of The Coolest Vintage Sampling Keyboards
2. A Question About Roland Digital Pianos

Not only does this bit of trivia make this a great find on the second hand market, it is usually reasonably priced. When new, if I remember correctly, it was only $300 – $400.

Here’s a demonstration of the sound and functionality of the Realistic MG-1. If you managed to find one of these gems, drop me a line and tell me how you found it.

The Realistic Concertmate MG-1: A Moog In Cheap Clothing is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. Nine Inexpensive Vintage Synths That Are Actually Decent

The Roland SH-1000 Analog Synthesizer

This was the very first synth I ever owned. It sat right on top of my A-100 Hammond organ (same as a B-3 with the addition of built in speakers).

If you don’t have a vintage hardware synth in your studio, this would bring you hours of audio enjoyment. It is especially good at big, fat basses. It’s also very easy to create all those weird, ethereal analog sounds you’ve heard so often. While the controls are limited, there’s enough to get thousands of different sounds very quickly.

I’ve seen this unit selling for as little $100 on the used market. I would personally pay as much as $300 for one in really good shape. Here’s a full video demo of the Roland SH-1000:

Here’s the factual breakdown on this cool retro synth from Wikipedia:

The Roland SH-1000, introduced in 1973, was the first compact synthesizer produced in Japan. It resembles a home organ more than a commercial synth, with coloured tabs labelled with descriptions of its presets and of the “footage” of the divide-down oscillator system used in it’s manually editable synthesizer section. It produced electronic sounds that many professional musicians sought after whilst being easier to obtain and transport than its western equivalents.

Although it has limited capabilities, with 10 simple preset voices, the SH-1000 has a manually editable section which can be manually tweaked around to create new interesting sounds. However, there is no user program memory available, so a musician would have to remember settings. Its effects include white noise generator, portamento, octave transposition, two low frequency oscillators and a random note generator.

Some famous SH-1000 users:

• The Band
• The Human League
• Blondie
• Jethro Tull
• The Rose Phantom (revideolized)
• Fad Gadget
• Jarvis Cocker (Pulp)
• Imagination
• Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music)
• Radio Massacre International
• Tetsuya Komuro

If you pick one of these up, please let me know! I’d love to hear about it and see some pics.

Roland SH-1000 Synth – Get Your Analog On! is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. My Old Friend, The Roland D50
2. A Question About the Roland SH-1000

Akai X7000 Keyboard Sampler

This was the first sampling keyboard that I owned, and what a blast it was! I must have sampled everything within ten miles of my house and all my friends and relatives too!

If you can find this vintage piece (street price around $300 – $400) I know you’ll have a lot of fun as well. There are a few things to watch out for though.

It uses an outdated 2.8″ format disk drive that records to Quick Disks. If the drive is broken or wears out it could be very hard to find a replacement. As for finding blank disks, a quick search on Google didn’t turn up much. There were some hardware word processors that used this same disk format so that might give you some leads.

Also, the keyboard itself wasn’t very heavy duty. I’m a hard player and I had to replace the entire keyboard assembly every sixteen months or so.

However, you have to keep in mind that I was gigging and rehearsing five to seven nights per week, so it saw a lot of use and abuse. In your studio environment that probably wouldn’t even be an issue.

Other hardware samplers you might like to look at would be the Ensoniq Mirage and EPS, the Emu Emax and the Roland S10.

The Akai X7000 – One Of The Coolest Vintage Sampling Keyboards is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. Akai X7000 Question From Carl

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!

The Roland U220 – My Favorite ROMpler is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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Roland D50

Not only did I record with this keyboard, I toured and played live with it for more than a decade without one single failure! Now that’s roadworthiness.

But more importantly, there was the quality of the sound! At the time everyone was raving over the Korg M1, and it was okay. But when I laid my hands on this piece of gear, it was magic to my fingers and my ears. Once I got a hold of many of the top aftermarket patch cards for it, it really took it over the top. Layering it with my Roland U220 was also a scream. Talk about thick!

Here’s a great breakdown on this powerful synth from the Vintage Synth Explorer blog:

The D-50 is an all-time favorite digital synth that’s still just as popular today as when it first came out in ’87. Once Roland’s hottest digital synth, it competed against the Yamaha DX7, and was much easier to use.

By joining 8-bit PCM samples with “LAS” synth-generated sounds, the D-50 is capable of unique and complex sounds. The PCM samples contained the attack transients, while the rest of the sound came from the Linear Arithmatic Synth (LAS) section which sounds very analog, with subtractive-style synthesis and low-pass-resonant filters.

Built-in chorus and (for the first time) digital reverb are also included for giving your sounds space and life! It also has a joystick controller for real-time timbre manipulation. The D-50 was great for new and non-acoustic, percussive, ethereal and beautiful pads & sounds.

The Roland D550 Rack Mount

Both the D-50 and D-550 benefit from the PG-1000 external controller which gives you very plain and simple slider/fader type control of all adjustable parameters of the synth.

The D-50 includes MIDI on all 16 channels but because it is monotimbral you can only use one channel at a time. There is an upgrade which will give the D-50 and its rackmount version a full 16 channels of simultaneous MIDI multitimbral data communication.

This popular synth has been widely used in all forms of music. Eric Clapton, Enya, 808 State, Jean Michel Jarre, Vince Clarke, Apollo 440, Eat Static, LTJ Bukem, Fluke, Information Society, Lab-4, Gary Numan, Rick Wakeman, Kitaro, Rush, Vangelis, Richard Barbieri, Boston and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran are just a few of the many satisfied users.

I’m glad I decided never to sell this important part of my personal music history.

My Old Friend, The Roland D50 is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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1. The Roland KR-33 Digital Piano – Sleeping Giant

Tom from the Waveformless blog in Seattle, WA put together a nice little blog post detailing some of these “sleeper” synths out there waiting for you.

Here’s the list of what he highlights (I’ve had a few of these in the past. Now I’m sorry I got rid of them!):

• Casio CZ-101 (typically less than $100)
• Ensoniq ESQ-1 (typically $150-$300)
• Moog (Realistic) Concertmate MG-1 (typically $100-$500)
• Oberheim Matrix-6R (typically $150-$350+)
• Roland HS-10/80 (typically $25-$100)
• Roland HS-60 (typically $200+)
• Roland MKS-7 (typically $200+)
• Yamaha CS-01 (typically $150-$250)
• Yamaha TX81Z (typically $50-$85)

Here’s the Moog Realistic Concertmate MG-1 in action:

Do you have a recommendation for additions to this list? Leave a comment!

Nine Inexpensive Vintage Synths That Are Actually Decent is a post from: The Dirt Floor Recording Blog

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