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New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 03:11, 8 October 2017
by SledDriver
Anyone found a decent manual or tutorials written in English (rather than poorly translated into it) for this wonderful keyboard. I'm rather hoping there is an enthusiast site somewhere which explains the workings of the instrument in somewhat clearer language/diagrams, but Google has only turned up some VERY brief video tutorials which explain little, and this forum, which isn't a tutorial.

And it's not just the translation. Little effort has been put into this manual.

Example from Page 16:

"Memo: If you use the ZONE EFFECTS [SELECT] button to select 'CTRL', the [DLY SEND] knob can adjust the delay send level. If this value is '0', turning the DELAY [LEVEL]-[FEEDBACK] knobs has no effect. --> 'DLY (Delay Send Level)' in the zone settings (ZONE EDIT."

Well just what on earth is that supposed to mean??

And there is NO DLY SEND knob on my RD-2000.

The manual is just fully off these half baked ambiguous statements, which is making it very hard to learn this instrument.

Also, I'm sure I am seeing a bug when using Modulation - when I move away from a zone and then come back, the encoder knob light indicators are not updating properly with the correct values for the zone, and then as soon as I touch the knobs, the values are jumping to the levels previously set immediately - negating the whole point of having encoder knobs in the first place.

I'm on firmware 1.03

Anyone else seeing these problems?

Cheers,

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 04:34, 22 October 2017
by DesertBoat
One thing Roland has done with the RD2000 is use eight rotary dials and nine sliders do multiple things. You can argue whether this is a logical layout, but with time it starts to become natural. I have used several synthesizers before, but still find I spend a lot of time in the owners manual and particularly the parameters guide. Makes me wish for the simple days of my old SK-20.

The picture at the bottom of page 13 might help in this case.

At the top of 16, they are discussing adjusting the reverb and delay settings. The picture on page 13 shows these are global. When the LED under zone select is on reverb/delay, then you have control of these.

Reverb and delay send is a zone setting. Press the same zone select button until the CTL lights up. Then use the zone select button to chose the zone you wish to edit. Under the fifth knob from the left is Delay Send (counting master volume as the first).

For the second question, when you say "move away from a zone," are you staying in the same program and selecting a different number zone to edit, or are you changing to a different program? On mine, also on 1.0.3, when I select zone 2, change mod parameters, select zone 1, then go back to zone 2, the lights go back to the newly selected value. I guess I need to understand the key sequence to try and recreate, since mine seems to operate as designed (but maybe not as expected).

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 01:28, 10 February 2018
by SledDriver
Is it just me, but I've had this RD2000 6 months now, and still have only scratched the surface.

Firstly, thanks to DesertBoat for the reply you gave some time ago. I've read your comments, and had another go, but I am still far from understanding how some parts of this keyboard really work.

I'm finding the manual to be hopeless, and the only online tutorials are by Ed Diaz (sp?) who frankly, is not a teacher, but a demonstrator. He just keeps saying you can do things, but rarely really explains the structures behind why you would want to do them.

There are two areas I want to understand much better:

1. I still have zero idea as to why I would ever want to use Scene over a Program. I watch Ed and he saves a bunch of sounds to a program - fine - I get that. Then he seems to save the exact same lineup of sounds to a Scene, and he never says why I would ever want to do this.

2. Does anyone care to try and teach me how the multi-purpose encoder knobs and their associated buttons work. They rarely do what I expect.

I've Googled these things many times with little to no useful results. The keyboard as been around for getting on for a year now, and I rather expected the information situation to be improving by now, perhaps with an independent enthusiasts web site, but I can't find anything like that.

I love the RD2000 for the quality of the sounds, and play it a lot, but frankly, without better information, it is only being used as a simple, but brilliant, piano and DAW controller.

Regards,

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 03:09, 10 February 2018
by SledDriver
To DesertBoat...

I just found your excellent earlier reply about some of this stuff viewtopic.php?f=62&t=54289

But I'm still not sure why I want to use a Scene. Ed's video seems to show the only benefit is that you can then select the sounds on the bigger tone buttons, but as I can already enable/disable tones on the zone buttons right next to each tones fader using a program, I still fail to see the benefit of making a scene.

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 10:30, 10 February 2018
by EVC
One advantage I see is you can align your favourite programs in one scene bank. Another one is with this alignement, you may program a sequence of scenes with different combinations of layers of the same program and switch between them either manually by pressing the panel switches, or by using the FC pedals to up/down them. You can do that with programs too as there are lots of slots available but I think scenes provide a more convenient way to do it. I believe it creates two mindsets, on towards programming the sounds and storing them for further use (programs) and other towards using them for a performance, playing with the order, adding, deleting, flipping, without concerns about deleting or changing them.

Bottom line is you use programs to create/modify sounds to your liking and scenes to store a sequence of programs for a performance.

Of course, the above are my impressions. I think some other high end instruments (e.g. Korg Kronos) have something similar, though named differently.

I have seen somewhere there is a difference between programs and scenes but I did not remember which.

As for the first part of your message, I totally agree, it is very complex and so far there has been little help about how to better use it. And the available documentation is not very helpful as it does not explain what some parameters are (beyond the obvious) and how to better take advantage of them. So, we are on our own. :(

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 16:02, 10 February 2018
by Corrençois
I'm a one month owner and am having a similarly frustrating time getting to know this instrument. What I find particularly irritating is the impossibility of editing and saving a tone. From the point of view of assigning controllers and pedals, it means I have to repeat the same edits every time I create a new program or re-edit an existing one, which can take a great deal of time. Using the 'Remain' option in the main settings doesn't seem to allow you to choose which function you wish to keep; it only remembers the setting you want while the machine is switched on. As soon as you switch off the machine and reboot it all goes back to the factory setting. The manual is very vague about the deeper functions of this piano.

'Scenes' appear to have be an afterthought when they realised that those nice big buttons on the front of the keyboard would be useless to anyone who wanted to create and organise their own programs for a live show.

I took took it out on a live gig last week to see how I would get on and I was struggling to find the right program on that very small screen so I think I shall be creating scenes and using the big buttons which just makes for more work.

Is there a way you can run two zones through the same tremolo (rotary) effect? I want to create a double manual organ using two TW organ zones split on the keyboard and i can't seem to get the rotary to spin on both manuals at the same time. Only the selected zone responds.

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 16:55, 10 February 2018
by SledDriver
I find the terms Program and Scene totally unhelpful. They are ambiguous in the music world.

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 20:31, 10 February 2018
by EVC
Corrençois wrote:I'm a one month owner and am having a similarly frustrating time getting to know this instrument. What I find particularly irritating is the impossibility of editing and saving a tone.
I did not understand this. You may edit the programs and save them as a new program in one of the vacant (user) programs. Would you like to overwrite the original programs?

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 21:53, 10 February 2018
by SledDriver
I'm OK with not being able to overwrite the original tones. It is reassuring to know they can't be 'damaged'.

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 10:08, 11 February 2018
by EVC
I guess (and hope) Roland will release a firmware update that will address some of the issues found along these months since the last update. A system saving the pedals configuration is certainly one of them.

Re: New user struggling with first Roland keyboard

Posted: 12:55, 11 February 2018
by Corrençois
I don't like not being able to use those lovely big useful Tone buttons that were put there presumably for easy 'on the fly' use. I only want to assign some control functions and save them as a GLOBAL parameter. That way I can just press the button marked Piano or Organ and play the sound that I want with my foot pedals assigned to the functions that I want without having to go through the rigmarole of creating a program and then transforming that program into a scene and then having to remember where I saved it to when I'm on stage as I don't always work with a playlist. It is all very time consuming and unintuitive. It would just be nice to have Assignable Global parameters as you do in most machines of this price.

@EVC, I realise that I can edit Tones and save them as Programs. That is fine, except that Programs only appear on the LCD screen which is very small, hard to read and fiddly to select in a live context. Programs can't assigned to the Tone buttons so, next you have to create a Scene to assign the aforementioned Program to a Tone button. It's a lot of work just to get a foot pedal to respond in a different way to the factory default.

@SledDriver, I quite agree. Programs are to Roland what Setup is to Kawai what performance is to Yamaha and what Combi is to Korg - who call what Roland call a Tone a Program. And there we go full circle!