Thought of a great unique idea for the pads

Forum for Roland FA-06/08
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Skijumptoes
Posts: 681
Joined: 11:08, 21 June 2010

Thought of a great unique idea for the pads

Post by Skijumptoes »

No doubt never be implemented, but just had a great thought.

After looking on the recent harmoniser question in this sub forum thread, i thought how great it would be if you could put the pads into harmoniser/chord mode, so you pick what each pad does when held on, i.e. you could have a setup like:-

Pad 1 - adds 5th Notes
Pad 2 - adds 7th Notes
Pads 13-16 - adds -2,-1,+1,+2 Octaves etc.

Obviously something more fleshed out but as an idea i think it would really add to the FA as a performance keyboard, particularly when you go to pad mode and see many empty spaces to put more functionality in like this.

As someone who forgets Chord Memory even exists, i think i'd make a ton of use if it was a pad function.

Anyone else got some unique Pad Mode ideas?
stevel
Posts: 520
Joined: 07:08, 17 May 2015

Re: Thought of a great unique idea for the pads

Post by stevel »

I totally don't expect Roland to add any features to the FA series at this point.

You could potentially do this with SysEx messages though. I'd have to check the gibberish, but you could probably send a message string to turn the harmonizer on and set it to a specific interval with a single button push on something like the A800/500/300 controllers.

I'd be more excited if I could simply control the MFX from a knob or button, and if the line input could be routed to a guitar amp sim effect. Those are the two biggest blunders I've found on this instrument.
Skijumptoes
Posts: 681
Joined: 11:08, 21 June 2010

Re: Thought of a great unique idea for the pads

Post by Skijumptoes »

Haha, well, funnily enough i started working on a plugin in ctrlr and obviously using SysEx you can control so much more on the FA, like some of the MFX settings etc. And then once i got it running, i placed the FA in DAW Control mode, and then assigned the Midi CC's from DAW control direct to the plugin, and in the background it was controlling different elements.

Far too convoluted, but i somehow felt better that it 'could' be done. Really, i'd be better spending more time actually playing instruments than working out how they work! lol

It does bug me a little that in some of the pre-release demos of the FA the UK Roland rep was being very specific that the pads could be updated very simply in Japan, and that's why the blank modes still showed on the screen when using pad mode.

It's a shame they never pro-actively followed those promises up. Because, via user feedback they could really ramp up the real time functionality of the FA, i first noticed the Juno G based on it's sampling (v2.0) update and it really interested me to the point that i went and bought one on impulse!
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