Roland Clan Forums

My adventures with Roland gear are discussed in the latest 'Local Heroes' podcast interview released by Teesside Band Archive. It features chat about my music, the artists who have influenced my songwriting, the joys of playing keytar and three exclusive performances recorded in live session. You ca...

Just read my assessment of 18 months ago again. I have to admit that my opinion has changed since then. At home the M-Audio MidAir works perfectly every time. At gigs, however, I have found it unreliable. Even when I am standing right next to the receiver, I find it regularly misses notes. I mean at...

There have been some advances in terms of ease of use. For example, it seems easier to call up patches on the Jupiter via those nice big buttons (which are reminiscent of the sound buttons on Roland keytars).

At the moment, most new releases seem to be rehashes of old technology. The Integra, great though I'm sure it is, is just an amalgamation of various sound boards that had been around for years. The 'new' Jupiters don't appear to offer anything new over the Fantom range. If anything, they have fewer ...

I think we may see a new keytar from Roland, whether at NAMM this month or at Musikmesse later in the year. Alesis have made an impressive entry into the keytar market with the new Vortex and they have targeted the MIDI control side of things. Roland's current keytar models - the AX-Synth and the Lu...

I've been using M-Audio's MidAir system for a few months now, at first with a Behringer UMA25s and an Alesis Fusion, and more recently with a Roland Lucina AX-09 and both my SonicCell and Fantom-G. I've found it to be a pretty good system, very reliable. Only criticism would be that the receiver has...

One other possibility that occurs to me, because you mentioned that songs sometimes become 'INIT SONG', is a long-running and still unfixed bug in the Fantom-G's operating system. If you have MIDI Sync Output set to 'on' by default, the Fantom-G may fail to load data properly the next time you boot ...

I'm curious about how good the black version of the Lucina looks after several months gigging?

I think it would be difficult to do this without creating a full song on the sequencer because the drummer will always need a full song click track to sync with sequences of that kind, even if they only appear occasionally during a performance. However, if you wanted to retain flexibility to shorten...

Golden Rule of Roland #1: It's never the cheaper option. Unfortunately.

pianocomsabor: "In my opnion developers should not waste their time trying to implement/update/re- invent killer sequencers for a workstation. A workstation can not compete with a computer daw, full stop. Why waste your time sequencing on a keyboard when every detail can be viwed on a huge com...

<t>If the question was 'Why do synths need a sequencer?', my answer would be that they do not need a sequencer. Without a sequencer, however, a synth workstation is just a synth, not a workstation. <br/> <br/> Computers offer many great features but they are not yet the ideal technology for gigging ...

mokkarma: "They programmed a great new feature for pitch bending the guitars, but in 20 years they didn't solve the problem on how to trigger properly the rotary slow/fast with the joystick (like on Korg) when you play organ patches! They still reuse the old patches and controller settings and...

@Spo Elman Most people who complain about the Fantom-G and the company that manufactures it would be happy to acknowledge that Roland have produced some great products previously. Our positive experiences with those instruments were probably what persuaded us to buy the Fantom-G in the first place. ...

Well intentioned though they are, the trouble with some of the suggested 'workarounds' for the Fantom-G's data management problems - such as creating separate projects for studio and live work - is that they don't reflect the realities of everyday use. If you're jamming on the keyboard and come up w...