AROIOS

True that. Little nits like this makes me feel less silly about my (extremely redundant) collection of JV, XP, XV racks/boards. Fixed. Got my little XV2020 box and an iPad editor. That scratches my Roland itch. Yup. And I'd recommend the XV-5050. It offers onboard editing (although inconvenient compared to your iPad editor), better expansion capacity, and a digital output, for just a little more than the XV2020 on the current market. Oh, the 5050 also doesn't involve the wall wart and midi cable/adapter that's inherent with the half-rack-synth+iPad configuration. A quick search in the NEW-FANTOM reference manual revealed that the same idiocy I mentioned is there. In other words, MFX is applied undiscriminately to all partials. Btw, the stupid marketing "New Speak" in the New-FANTOM manual immediately caught my eye. A "Performance" is now called a "Scene", a "Part" called a "Zone", and a "Patch" called a "Tone". I can live with different brands naming the same concept in their own ways. But within a brand's own product lines, you'd expect some consistency. The last example is particularly annoying and confusing because the jargon "Tone" used to refer to a "Partial" on every synth from JV/XP to Old-FANTOM. And that's likely where you got the impression that New-FANTOM offers "Tone" level FX routing. Using widely accepted names to refer to new, different things is a rookie mistake in UI/UX design. Unfortunately it's also a common sin committed by marketing bozoes, and someone at Roland obviously enjoyed doing that. If someone is willing to go that kind of length to defend a brand, that brand is likely part of his/her identity. And there's no hope of rational discussion at that point. We see this all the time on topic like iPhone vs. Android, PC vs. Mac, Canon vs. Nikon, Democrat vs. GOP, Religion A vs. Religion B, Sports Team A vs. Team B... And in case my post sounds like brand bashing, it's not. I'm not attached to or against particular brands, and I'm sure the majority of any major brands' employees are doing a decent job. Issues like what I mentioned can often be the result of just one or several bozoes that weren't mindful enough.

IMO, this is exactly why Roland would have taken away the ability to use MFX at the granular level of a partial/tone. Especially so when later model products incorporate sounds as presets with "baked in" MFX. That doesn't make sense. MFX has been "baked in" the patches since JV-1080. And we had the option to add vanilla flavor to the cake but not the nuts. What Roland does now on the newer synth is applying the same flavor, with the same intensity, to all the ingredients in your cake. Again, Combi/Performance has been standard feature since JV-1080, nothing new here (except increasing MFX count from 1 in JV-1080 to 16 on the Integra-7). So the patch layering capability has always been there, except that now you're forced to resort to Combi/Perf layering if you want a chorused/phasered EP layered with a dry AP. (and who puts a chorus or phaser on AP?) It's actually way more annoying than that, coz you'll have to dial in two identical patches on two parts, disable all EP tones and MFX on one part (serving as the clean AP layer), and then disable AP tone(s) on the other part (serving as the EP layer).

What you described is the "Part" or "Patch" level EFX routing, which is standard feature for pretty much any romplers made after the early 90's. Under the hood, each of the 16 parts (individual patches) on your DS consists of another 4 sub-parts. Different brands refer to these sub-parts by different names. Partial, tone, layer, element are the commonly used jargons. What Roland had on their older romplers but took out on the Integra-7 (and likely most of their newer romplers) is the option to route each of these sub-parts to the MFX.

Not mad, just cringing over idiotic design/engineering decisions, which is pretty much the story of my life.

Yes, we only need to compare a few PCM (non Super Natual) patches on the Integra-7 (or Zenology, and very likely other recent Roland romplers) with their namestake counterparts on a JV/XP/XV synth to notice the difference. And by "differences" I really mean deterioration, for the reason I mentioned above. Roland romplers' synthesis structure changed little in the last 30 years. Most of the "upgrades" happened on the effects and sample sizes. And they are notorious for recycling their old sounds. Having essentially the same rompler engine for 30 years makes their sound designers' job much easier, when they try to bring legacy sounds of the JV/XP onto the XV/Integra/FA/New-Juno synths. I personally don't have a problem with that since it reduces the need to keep old rompler racks around. But why they took out something that worked perfectly fine with no apparent reason boggles my mind. With that said, having experienced my fair share of Bozoism in the corportate world, I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made by someone lacking some basic experience with sound design or understanding of Eric Persing's intent on the original JV sounds. On the flip side, Roland's success in recycling JV sounds for the last 20 years goes to show how powerful the JV's hardware (RISC CPUs) and software were 30 years ago and how well that architecture stood against the test of time. What dates these machines now are mostly just their tiny samples, a reflection of high memory prices at the time.

The classic Roland Romplers from JV/XP to Fantom allowed user to apply insertion effects (Roland calls it MFX) down to each of up to 4 tones (also called "partial", or "layer", or "element") that make up a patch. In other words, each tone in a 4-layer patch can decide individually: 1)Whether it wants to send through the MFX 2)How much it wants to send through the MFX Starting from Integra-7, Roland moronically eliminated that flexibility and now you can only choose between applying MFX equally to all tones or have no MFX at all. In other words, now the MFX application is a "Patch" level decision and not a "Partial/Tone/Layer" level decision any more. This is moronic because: 1)Those few lines of code to enable "Partial/Tone/Layer" level effects-routing was written in the early 90's and has worked well for every JV/XP/XV/Fantom synth. It doesn't make sense to strip away something that simply works. 2)"Partial/Tone/Layer" level effects routing is not just some incidental feature that has little practical usage. One typical case where you need that is piano sound layering. It's extremely common to layer an acoustic piano tone with an electric one. And you would usually apply effects like chorus and phaser etc only to the electric piano tone, but not the acoustic one. Now with Roland's moronic decision, when you pull up a typical piano patch that involves both acoustic and electric piano tones, all the chorus/phaser/tremolo/etc effects intended for the EP are applied indiscriminately to the AP tone. As a result, the patch sounds cheap and "flangy". Those of you who may have noticed how certain keyboard patches (e.g. "MIDIed Grand")from your JV/XP/XV synths sounds "off" when you played them in Integra-7 (or Zenology, and likely most recent Roland romplers for that matter). Now you know why.

It's eye opening to hear the hip Imaj9/IV chord at 1:48. I find most of my favorite "magic"s of harmony in Dominant Chords. Once you establish a basic scaffold of root and b7, there are so many different flavors you can create by tweaking the other notes in the voicing. Using food as an analogy, if major and minor chords serve as the main ingredients (chicken, pork and potatos etc) of a sonic dish, dominants are the spices that make it unique and interesting. Ambiguity and richness are huge for me, and triads are usually a turn-off except in Rock. Here's one of my favorites: The Spy Movie Chord, or m/M9 (in half steps: 0-3-4-4-3). It sounds ambiguous as fuck and I dig it.

You are absolutely right. Fart sounds in 24bit/96khz are still fart sounds. Some of my observations: 1) Most people are conformists who follow fads. When Romplers/FM are in fashion, they sell their analog gear; when farting sounds are in fashion, they buy them back. 2) Most people are too lazy/ignorant to make good use of the gear they have. Folks like Eric Persing and John Lehmkuhl can take a GS/XG module and produce sounds that make us drool. 3) Sample programmers today have obscene disregard for computing resources,. With that said, there are many situations where large samples and heavy computing overhead can be justified. Keyscape and U-he synths come to mind. (Despite the irony that "Crystal Rhodes" in Keyscape takes up a million times more space than the original samples in JD800 because Eric has to get around Roland's IP on a 30 year old sound engine. To save this post from falling into another shouting contest, why don't we take it in a productive direction and share/demonstrate interesting sounds created with some easily accessible synths?

Ravel and Debussy were right on my mind when the professor Nik interviewed mentioned about how the French schools had to tone down Partimento to the more accessible Roman systems for the elite kids. I would LOVE to hear/watch a breakdown of Ravel/Debussy's music (or Liszt's for that matter) from a Partimento perspective. I would love even more to see an Impressionist revival. The precious "little" Ravel and Debussy gave us always leaves me wanting more. Sure, we've got Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Fred Hersch on the Jazz side of things, but there seems to be a wide world of harmonic beauty out there, under-explored, after the height of Impressionism. The 50/60's Bossa Nova and Easy-Listening offered a lot of interested new colors I enjoyed. And we've talked at length about the sonic wizardry of modern Gospel music. But on the Classical side of things, I haven't heard much in the 20th century that touch me the way Impressionism did.

Thank you for helping us discover Isaac's videos, uhoh7. The first few bars of the tune he played at the end of the first video immediately reminded me of Francis Lai's Un Homme Et Un Femme. The rest of the tune sounds quite Brazil, like something out of a Tom Jobim songbook. I indulged in the fun of transcribing and playing it. My doodling ended up in a short Bossa Nova piece. Enjoy! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5SFXFk3qow8r2Iv8RhWUKldVktDyQOW/view?usp=sharing Gorgeous, and exactly what a silly child of the 60's like myself needs to calm me down Today I discovered another incredible channel which likens the teaching of Barry Harris to the current revival of "Partimento", which is the teaching method, developed in Naples, used by Handel, Mozart, and Bach, with their students. It went totally extinct, but is being revived by a slew of great scholars now. Thank you for introducing us to the concept of Partimento and I'm glad your enjoy the little Bossa piece, uhoh7. Learning about the history of the Roman notations and Functional theories in contrast to the practice of Partimento is quite eye opening and liberating. It reminded me of the freedom Gospel harmony offers: "If the melody note is part of a chord, then we're free to experiment with harmonizing that note with that chord. Screw the theories, just rely on your ears to decide whether that chord sounded good in that context." With that said, it's ironic (but not surprising) how rigid and unimaginative "Partimento" music sounded in general. The Partimento composers still had their hands tied by the rules they inherited after all.

Thank you for helping us discover Isaac's videos, uhoh7. The first few bars of the tune he played at the end of the first video immediately reminded me of Francis Lai's Un Homme Et Un Femme. The rest of the tune sounds quite Brazil, like something out of a Tom Jobim songbook. I indulged in the fun of transcribing and playing it. My doodling ended up in a short Bossa Nova piece. Enjoy! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K5SFXFk3qow8r2Iv8RhWUKldVktDyQOW/view?usp=sharing

Speaking of the m6 chord, I just dug up my notes from 2017 and here's what I jotted down: " Im6; II11b9; IV9; VIm7b5; VII7#5, they all share the same upper structure" This relationship among the minor(m6), dominant(the 7s and 9s), and half-dim(m7b5) chords offers a lot of flexibility when we (re)harmonize.

Thanks for sharing these tips, uhoh7. My experience with computers prompted me to start looking at chords as combinations of intervals a few years ago, that exercise opened up a lot of new possibilities to reharmonization. It is also very much in line with the wisdom you shared.

Thanks for helping me discover Kay, uhoh7. I love his excellent instructions.

Thanks for sharing this excellent composition from Keith, Al. Jonny's video immediately reminded me of Bill Evans' "Peace Piece": [video:youtube]

Thanks Docbop and Elmer, the quotes above and the Holdsworth video are quite enlightening.

Jonny is an awesome instructor. The runs he demonstrated in this video are useful for a lot of occasions. I can already see myself applying these in Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett tunes. [video:youtube]

Truly did not expect the end result here to be the mounting of a defense placing Milli Vanilli 'miles ahead' of today"s 'garbage' music! I agree these conversations do have that ring of dinner table politics - older folks telling younger folks how it is without any real idea about the current scene. If anyone would like to take a constructive approach and learn about all the great music out there these days (and great Vanilli-esque schlock! Schlock can be great and meaningful to people, too!), then I"m sure there are plenty of folks here happy to oblige with some links, myself included. Excellent suggestion. I don't particularly care for Milli Vanilli tunes, but a quick glance at their Youtube channel turns up something perfectly listenable: [video:youtube]

SV1 You picked exactly every Casio PX5S sample! Yes, EQ makes a lot of difference, and this is also something that differentiates the boards. On the Vox, there is no program or sound specific user-adjustable EQ (just a global EQ). There are some other Rhodes sounds in it that have different EQ from the four Vox samples I included here, but those other Rhodes sounds also have some other effect baked in (say, tremolo), which means you can't play the sound with that EQ without also having that effect. So while I think the Vox is a strong Rhodes, you have very limited ability to tweak it to taste. The SV1 has better EQ facilities... each sound has available 3-band EQ, and the mid is sweepable via the editor. The PX-5S goes that one better... the frequencies of all 3 bands are sweepable. . Excellent info, thanks for compiling/sharing them AnotherScott.

Ok, I need to stop wasting time in the rabbit hole of arguing over opinions before another round of back-and-forth starts. These kind of discussions remind me of dinner table arguments over politics and religions. Come to think of it, nothing constructive had ever come out of those.

I love your sarcasm and understand where you are coming from regarding "Every Rose" and Milli Vanilli. To think it through though, it's not much different from Michachel Bolton bashing. Or for that matter, how Doobie Brothers and Jefferson Airplane fans hated these bands' new incarnations. Most casual listeners are conformists. And it's very convenient and comforting to bash a band/artist when everyone else is doing so. But I don't expect the same from musicians. For a musician, it should be obvious that "Every Rose" is not any worse than "Knocking on Heaven's Door" when we strip out the lyrics. Scandals aside, the arrangements of Milli Vanilli tunes are miles ahead of the "ee-ee-aa-aa, woh-oh-woh-oh" garbage around us today. If those are the best examples you can come up with, you've just proven my point. Oh, and you missed the word "statistically" in my ranting. Having 15 bad songs in Top 40 in 1990 is not the same as having 30 bad songs in it in 2015.

Speaking of Lay Lay, she should to an autotune version of this to a hip hop beat. I'd be perfect. Ok, I jumped on the idea and made a quick Jazz Hop demo version of what I would enjoy listening to: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18mgG_wi1675g0Se3Euk-wsdb0TYkf4KX/view

Speaking of Lay Lay, she should to an autotune version of this to a hip hop beat. I'd be perfect. [video:youtube] LOL Just for the record, I did not post Lay Lay as an example of good or bad music. ... There are plenty of things in this world to lament. Musical expression isn't one of them. We should celebrate the variety even if our ears are crying. I haven't even got to EDM Thanks for being a good sport, uhoh7. And NO, don't get me started on EDM! Joking aside, genres don't necessarily define the quality of music labeled under them. The "sound" we associate with a genre is often just a cliche created by musicians following/imitating the trend setters. I first had that revelation 17 years ago. In the 90's, I hated Trance and considered it the idiotic cousin of House. That was until I played some Cheryl Lynn chord progressions on a Trance combi preset from Korg TRITON. Boy did it sound good. At that moment I realized I don't hate Trance, at least not for its defining rhythm and sounds, I was just extremely bored by the anemic harmony on most Trance tracks I encountered. So chances are, throw some nice chords on top of an otherwise ear-grinding EDM beat, and we'll get something tasteful in return.

Thanks for putting this together. My favorite is 3. 5,6,7 and 12,13,14 are my least favorite ones. With that said. A huge part of the perceived differences are simply a results of EQ curves.

Agreed! I apologize to ARIOS for being unreasonably harsh. I have seen the light. roygBiv, thanks for pointing out the irony. JazzPiano88, thanks for extending the olive branch and I'm sorry for adding fuel to the unnecessary fire earlier.