Roland V-Combo VR-09

[Messiaen]

Why don't people post thier views and issues on the Roland Blog?

 

I've already put a comment on there, if enough people put issues to Roland, maybe they will come up with solutions to some of the issues.

 

 

For putting comments on Roland Blog go to:

 

http://www.rolandus.com/blog/2013/05/13/v-combo-vr-09-made-for-live-playing/

 

I put a comment there containing all of the bug/design problems that I have noted so far, however I didn't see your comment (mine was the only comment). Perhaps I put my comment in the wrong place?

 

I put my comment on the new blog that was posted today, so your probably went onto an older one!

 

I do wonder how many of these they will sell. Judgeing by the comments here you organ guys are a tough bunch to please!!

 

To my novice ears, every demo video has had some sound that I have found pleasureable, which again for me is unsual for a synth/keyboard. I'm really more into synths than organs etc, but the sound of this just makes me want to play one!

[Craig MacDonald]

So to help get a handle on what the VR-09 organ sounds like, I've created an MP3 that can be heard on my soundcloud page.

 

So to preface this, when I put the VR-09 organ though SONAR and listened to it through my Yamaha Studio monitors, the sound completely sucked.. the difference between the sound of my QSC K10's and my studio monitors is like night and day.. so I had to completely re-do the settings.. so I spent a couple of minutes and dropped the key click levels down and adjusted the upper/lower gain a bit, and I think we've got a passable hammond sound now. There is no doubt that with a bit more time I could further tweak this and get it sounding better given a particular set of speakers, monitors, amp that you're listening to the organ through. However, I think this clip is good enough to get a sense for how good/bad the organ sounds. Unfortunately it still has a ring of "VK" engine to it.. I find it's hard not to hear that when you're listening through these monitors, however when I play through my QSC K10's at volume there's hardly a hint of VK engine, it sounds much more authentic. BTW, all of these different parts were recorded using basically the same settings for tone, upper/lower gain etc.. using the "Rock" organ setting, so the different sounds are just basically drawbar changes, and +/- C1 Chorus. There is a whole other organ in this thing and lot's of room for tonal changes and further editing the organ engine to get your own sound.

 

Here's the link to the mp3.. forgive all the clams and my awful sloppy playing. There are also a few clicks/pops and other artifacts in the recording, likely due to recording levels, here's the link

 

https://soundcloud.com/#ccmacdon

 

Listen to the clip entitled "VR-09 various organ sounds". From my perspective, the organ sounds pretty good and it's pretty versatile. It's certainly not up to the standards of our top clones these days but I think it sounds darn good for a $999 drawbar organ. BTW the last clip was made to sound rinky dink on purpose to demonstrate a kind of Garth Hudson lowrey sound. It sort of works.. ;-)

[Craig MacDonald]

I do wonder how many of these they will sell. Judgeing by the comments here you organ guys are a tough bunch to please!!

 

To my novice ears, every demo video has had some sound that I have found pleasureable, which again for me is unsual for a synth/keyboard. I'm really more into synths than organs etc, but the sound of this just makes me want to play one!

 

I think they'll sell a lot of them because it's so inexpensive and yet has so many uses.. YES I think it's a pretty fussy bunch here on the KC forums!! But hopefully with some patience and persistence it will sink into everyones heads that this is a $999 drawbar organ (with a whole lot of other stuff jammed in). We should really be excited about this agressive move by Roland rather than ripping them apart for some of the compromises they've made to establish a new low pricepoint for a useable drawbar organ! But that's just my opinion.

 

I think the organ demos all suck which is why I put a quick recording together that covers a broader set of Hammond sounds.. I did it very quickly and it's not the greatest demo but I think it will give people a bit of of a comfort level that the organ can sound pretty good (although I'm sure we'll hear some more "this organ sucks" comments which may just be the result of the way I tweaked it and my sloppy playing)

[Craig MacDonald]

LX, I do think it's a better sounding organ, primarily because of the leslie sim.. but primarily because of the leslie sim.. I really don't see why you're hounding me about my preferences here? I know you like the VK8m, that's fine you're entitled to your opinion.. I don't particularly.

[Craig MacDonald]

I've done the same thing with the EP's.. and loaded up a clip of me noodling through the various EP sounds, and tweaking the tone, overdrive and in some cased the MFX. It can be heard as well on my soundcloud site

 

https://soundcloud.com/#ccmacdon

 

The clip is called "VR-09 Electric Pianos"

 

The EP's are one of the the weaker areas of the VR-09, they seem to have very short samples and I hear the samples looping almost instantly when you sustain a note/chord.. However, you can get a lot of variation in the sound just by changing the tone, and Overdrive and MFX controls. Also by adding just a slight bit of phaser it's pretty easy to get rid of the static loop sound.

 

Again this is the VR-09 straight into SONAR with no effects beyond what is in the VR-09 itself. Like the Hammond organ I think you can get a wide variation of sound and you'll find workable tones.

 

 

 

 

[iluvchiclets]

Hi again Craig,

 

The organ sounds excellent - nice playing too.

 

There's something to be said about hearing the music without being the one actually playing it...you don't notice the way the keys feel, the effort going into making the music, and any environmental things like keys clicking or music coming from small speakers rather than a real leslie. I would have trouble figuring out if that were a real Hammond or not on your sound cloud. Sounds excellent.

 

The EPs are, as you mentioned, not as nice as I would hope. I think I will try to tame the bell-attack sound by maybe lowering the highs or something? Although, when you add a bit of dirt in there they really start to warm up (to my ears) and have a bit of bark to them.

 

Thanks for your effort in posting those clips.

[Craig MacDonald]

The EPs are, as you mentioned, not as nice as I would hope. I think I will try to tame the bell-attack sound by maybe lowering the highs or something? Although, when you add a bit of dirt in there they really start to warm up (to may ears) and have a bit of bark to them.

 

Thanks for your effort in posting those clips.

 

When I was noodling around with the EP's I was boosting the OD in a lot of cases, however if you're looking for the EP to create nice warm pads, you certainly don't want all that "barking" that's on this clip. thanks for the feedback happy to help..

[RetroVintageOld]

Delay time are also something very personal, does it mean those can't be changed for the FX knobs even with menu diving?

 

There's a "Tempo Delay" that locks to the tempo in the drum section (tempo is always flashing whether utilizing drums or not)...the tap tempo button is great and can be fine tuned by BPM with the dial. The delay knob controls number of repeats. MFX has a couple of tempo controlled effects, too: Tempo Step Phazer and Tempo Slicer, I haven't messed with the latter two yet.

 

I kind of poo-poo'd the looper before, but just tonight I used the audio recorder in song mode for a 3.5 minute idea using a split I made with a pad and a sax and utilizing one of the rock drum loops at half time...about 58 bpm. I'm very impressed how expressive the "N." instruments can be...and it's all captured within this one board. Simple, fast and easy can get even a time-squeezed, lazy procrastinator like me, semi-productive...what a great tool!

 

Can the tap tempo work on the tremlo?

[RetroVintageOld]

Why don't people post thier views and issues on the Roland Blog?

 

Good idea. I put a comment about the layer/split problems on thier Youtube video. Who knows if they'll pay attention.

[Craig MacDonald]

Haven't tested this but something tells me that the tempo speed of the VR-09 is different and independent from the speed of the tremolo, on the other hand the tempo slicer is connected to the tempo of the machine and can be set by tapping the tap tempo button.. I will have to double check this to be sure.

[RetroVintageOld]

I don't see ANY comments on the blog. Are they filtering out negative comments?

[Craig MacDonald]

I would have trouble figuring out if that were a real Hammond or not on your sound cloud. Sounds excellent.

 

 

I'm not sure that these clips would fool a real Hammond purist, and my point in posting them was to demonstrate that the VR organ actually sounds pretty good. I could have taken a bit more time to tweak the organ a bit more, but honestly, I'm really more concerned with how it sounds through my QSC K10's and through the K10's it really kicks ass. These clips sound OK... but live, at volume, it sounds great through the K10's, and I'm really anxious to try it with my band to see how well it cuts.

[Craig MacDonald]

OT--nice job on the Golden Slumbers and the rest of the End Craig. I was also listening to "Got to get you into my life" and different selections on your YT page. You guys give all this stuff a first-rate treatment . All real solid players and your singer is excellent too.

Dave, thank you very much..!! My 11STEPS band is a great band if you like the genre of music we play.. late mid 60's to mid 70's classic rock.. and they're all pretty good musicians that like playing together.. (which is really hard to find)..

 

Thanks for the kind words. What did you think of the VR-09 organ.. pretty good for $999?

[Kevmo]

Craig

I'm having no luck getting soundcloud to work If i PM u could you email the 2 files?

 

Kevin

[Craig MacDonald]

Kevin can you pm me your email and ill do it when get home later tonight (heading out to play baseball shortly and ill be home after 10:00)

 

If anyone else is having similar problems pm me and give me your email as well and ill flip them to you too.

[voxpops]

Guys, you need to remove the "#" from the URL:

 

[Craig MacDonald]

Guys, you need to remove the "#" from the URL:

 

thanks voxpops, sorry guys. Not sure how that got there..

[garnermike]

Guys,

 

The VR-700 is available at sweetwater for $1999, if that's what people want, go buy it.. It's 35 pounds rather than 12 pounds and I'm sure that for the pro player it has lot's of advantages over it's little brother the VR-09.

 

However the VR-09 is a different instrument targeted at a different audience and for that target market it has some serious advantages too.. like 12 pounds, and a built in VA synth, some cool live effects and an iPad editor.

 

Obviously some people don't like the keyboard.. fine let them go buy something more expensive, there are lots of options..! However, we're on page 38 now and the debate about the keyboard is getting really old!!!

 

Those of us who own one probably want to talk about how it works, what our thoughts are, compare notes on features/bugs/design issues etc.. all of this keyboard discussion is just getting in the way of us doing so.

 

The thing is that now is not the time to debate about the keyboard.. that horse left the barn.. it is what it is.. if you want to debate everything that's wrong with the music business these days, how about we start a new thread and leave the VR-09 thread for those of us who own one, or who want to buy one, and who are intersted in exchanging valuable information!

 

 

I owned a VR-760 @ 38 lbs. and 76 keys. In its hardcase it weighed 57 lbs, and was 55 inches long ---- just too damn big when playing 120 gigs a year, when one is 62 years old, and when needs to fit 2/3's of the bands gig in a fuel efficient vehicle.

 

So I didn't give the $2000 VR-700 a thought, especially since it was not much of an improvement over the VR-760, and would cost twice what the VR-09 does.

[garnermike]

Hammonddave...

 

Did they let you play the VR 09 at NAMM? They wouldn't let me play it. As far as I could tell they were just doing demos with it. They told me it wasn't finished or something like that.

 

It's possible that what was a NAMM isn't quite what is out now. I thought the organ sounded pretty good except for the percussion thing I mentioned. But Hammond Suzuki owners ( or past owners) generally don't like Rolands and vice versa.

 

Personally I prefer the leslie sim on this ( from what limited time I spent) to what I recall hearing from the SK1. Ditto for the chorus vibrato. Give me some basic drawbar tones with those two things and I can usually get what I want out of a clone ( as I do with a Numa).

 

 

 

Owning an SK1, I totally agree with you, LX88, when you write "Personally I prefer the leslie sim on this ( from what limited time I spent) to what I recall hearing from the SK1. Ditto for the chorus vibrato."

[LX88]

That's interesting.... you have an SK1 and you prefer the C/V and the leslie sim of the VR 09 to that of the SK1?

 

I actually hate to get into comparing, because you always seem to offend someone. But from what I can tell this VR09 sim stacks up pretty well.

 

The VR09 sim didn't give me anything NOT not like, during the brief time that I heard it. It sounded good on both slow and fast. And the Roland C/V sounded good too. Right up there with some of the best that I have heard.

 

A few of the other issues have been discussed, we don't have to go there. I was actually hoping that this could be something I could use. I love the idea of the weight.

 

Garnermike - how do you like the EP's compared to the SK1? I didn't get enough time with them.

 

 

[brenner13]

Alright, this utilizes no EP's, Clavs, or Organs, but it sure was fun to do this little one-chord modal thingy recorded live into the VR's Song Recorder - one track, one take. Played it back recorded into n-Track on the desktop, normalized to bring up the vol, converted to mp3 and downloaded to SoundCloud. It's OT from all the debate about this new toy/tool but represents something else the thing can do.

 

[jcazzy]

I've downloaded the VR-09 data list but am not sure that the VR-09 has a synthesized Flute or Tenor Sax setting. Being in a classic rock band, these are sounds that I really need as I'm thinking the VR-09 might be a good replacement for my Yamaha YPG-235 DP that has these sounds (pretty darn good too!) plus the fact that it would work for a backup organ replacement if my Korg CX-3 went south (that would be my reason for replacing the Yamaha).

 

I noticed there are Sax sounds just not Tenor unless I'm missing something. See no Flute though.

 

All in all from the demos I have heard, it is not that bad sounding and since I own a Roland GAIA synth, I think the keyboard would probably be something I'm used to playing. Although I've played keyboards for 50 years, I'm in no way a professional like some of you guys are here.

 

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

[jcazzy]

Alright, this utilizes no EP's, Clavs, or Organs, but it sure was fun to do this little one-chord modal thingy recorded live into the VR's Song Recorder - one track, one take. Played it back recorded into n-Track on the desktop, normalized to bring up the vol, converted to mp3 and downloaded to SoundCloud. It's OT from all the debate about this new toy/tool but represents something else the thing can do.

 

 

Hey brenner13 wish I would have noticed your post first, but was that a Sax sound using the VR-09 on your recording? If so, I can use that! Now for the Flute sound I'm after.

[brenner13]

I've downloaded the VR-09 data list but am not sure that the VR-09 has a synthesized Flute or Tenor Sax setting. Being in a classic rock band, these are sounds that I really need as I'm thinking the VR-09 might be a good replacement for my Yamaha YPG-235 DP that has these sounds (pretty darn good too!) plus the fact that it would work for a backup organ replacement if my Korg CX-3 went south (that would be my reason for replacing the Yamaha).

 

I noticed there are Sax sounds just not Tenor unless I'm missing something. See no Flute though.

 

All in all from the demos I have heard, it is not that bad sounding and since I own a Roland GAIA synth, I think the keyboard would probably be something I'm used to playing. Although I've played keyboards for 50 years, I'm in no way a professional like some of you guys are here.

 

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

 

Aw, man...you just saved me from feeling like a total schmuck posting my SoundCloud link. It's got sax towards the bottom of the brass list. The flute is under the Others button in the Synth section. It's pretty darn good, too.

[brenner13]

One track one take into the VR's internal song recorder using a pad/sax split I made and just a stock internal drum loop. Easy peasy.

[jcazzy]

I've downloaded the VR-09 data list but am not sure that the VR-09 has a synthesized Flute or Tenor Sax setting. Being in a classic rock band, these are sounds that I really need as I'm thinking the VR-09 might be a good replacement for my Yamaha YPG-235 DP that has these sounds (pretty darn good too!) plus the fact that it would work for a backup organ replacement if my Korg CX-3 went south (that would be my reason for replacing the Yamaha).

 

I noticed there are Sax sounds just not Tenor unless I'm missing something. See no Flute though.

 

All in all from the demos I have heard, it is not that bad sounding and since I own a Roland GAIA synth, I think the keyboard would probably be something I'm used to playing. Although I've played keyboards for 50 years, I'm in no way a professional like some of you guys are here.

 

Any thoughts on this? Thanks!

 

Aw, man...you just saved me from feeling like a total schmuck posting my SoundCloud link. It's got sax towards the bottom of the brass list. The flute is under the Others button in the Synth section. It's pretty darn good, too.

 

What is the flute listed as? I still don't see it.

[brenner13]

N.Flute. Fourth from the bottom of the list. I'd venture to say it is possibly more expressive than the sax. I'll dare to assume the "N." designates a few borrowed aspects of the SuperNatural engine utilizing two different "N" controller effects that can be assigned to the D-Beam and/or one or both pedals, but only on those select sounds. I used the D-Beam to introduce some growl to the sax in the clip. The other N control allows a somewhat realistic slur between notes, more pronounced than what was achieved by just playing legato rather quickly.

N.Bass controls are legato slide and harmonics, I think N.Flute is growl and slur (might be wrong on that) , and N.Trumpet is a downward slur or fall, and I can't remember the other - I've already packed it up ready for band practice tomorrow after work.

[jcazzy]

N.Flute. Fourth from the bottom of the list. I'd venture to say it is possibly more expressive than the sax. I'll dare to assume the "N." designates a few borrowed aspects of the SuperNatural engine utilizing two different "N" controller effects that can be assigned to the D-Beam and/or one or both pedals, but only on those select sounds. I used the D-Beam to introduce some growl to the sax in the clip. The other N control allows a somewhat realistic slur between notes, more pronounced than what was achieved by just playing legato rather quickly.

N.Bass controls are legato slide and harmonics, I think N.Flute is growl and slur (might be wrong on that) , and N.Trumpet is a downward slur or fall, and I can't remember the other - I've already packed it up ready for band practice tomorrow after work.

 

Thanks for your help. Finally saw that on the list. One flute sound I'm looking for with velocity sensitive touch is the Jethro Tull Ian Anderson sound. Does this keyboard have that? Not a deal breaker though.

[brenner13]

It's been several days since playing the flute...if memory serves the flute chiffing is not quite as pronounced as found on my Fantom X, but perhaps it is a bit more musical. It might be on one of the N controls...sorry, past bed time and memory fails. Perhaps someone else that has one can provide input? My next few days are jammed full.

[Craig MacDonald]

The VA synth engine has the flute chiff PCM sample so you could easily layer it together with the N Flute patch or build your own entirely using the VA synth. I have to say this again this VA synth is a tremendous addition to his drawbar organ.. Don't have a sound you want or need, just bud it in the va synth using the 363 PCM samples!