Roland Owners

[Bill H.]

Oops, sorry ZZWave...it's called cutoff keyfollow in Rolandese. I was exposing my analog roots by calling it key track. Anyway, here's what you're doing. Are you familiar with parametric EQ? That's what peaking filters are in a sense, but what makes them better than a parametric is that they occur at the oscillator (wave) level, not at the end of the overall sound. But here's what makes them really cool...Fc and Q (cutoff and resonance) can be modulated by all the standard synth engine sources. So in this case, we're fattening up a wave by placing Fc at or near the fundamental, boosting it's bottom end by raising Q, and making sure that it does it's job consistantly across the keyboard by setting key follow at 100% and disabling all other modulation sources so it stays put. Then...you're free to run the whole thing through the standard lowpass filter for standard soundshaping.

 

Roland puts a lot of synthesis power into it's romplers...peaking filters are but one example. Try experimenting with peaking filters on percussion be sure to keep the volume down so you don't blow out your woofers or subs.

[ZZWave]

Got it Bill!

 

You had me going there for awhile, but the fog has cleared.

 

Love the "Rolandese". Very good. Gotta remember that one!

 

Thank you for your patience. Much appreciated.

 

Peace..Ron

[Tusker]

Bump.

 

A Roland programming tutorial to demonstrate the power of booster and ring modulator DSPs, based on Andre Lowers request in this thread:

 

http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/ubb/get_topic/f/18/t/015439/p/1.html#000034

 

The easiest way to do this is to take an existing patch and take it places it would not normally go. We are going to start with A27: Delicate EP. Its pretty but doesnt have attitude. We are going to practice using the booster to give it a snarl, and later the ring modulator to give it a rubbery bounce. As you will see, there is a lot of interaction beween pitch, filter settings and gain structures, when using these DSPs.

 

First the Booster. We are aiming for a clipped wah kind of sound. So the basic strategy is to have a highly resonant filter sweeping the booster (much as a wah pedal would sweep into an amp).

 

Notice the patch has two tones.

 

1) Go to patch common and set structure to 3, and booster to 18. Youll notice that F1 (filter 1) is going into the booster, so the filer for tone one is going to be the highly resonant one. You should already hearing a fuzzy quality to this sound.

 

2) Go to Patch Wave menu and set the Gain for both tones to 12. The higher gains help amplify the effect of the booster. The rest of the steps are about shaping this tone which should be sounding slightly too buzzy.

 

1) In the filter menu for tone 1, select a bandpass filter (BPF) with cutoff of 30, resonance, of 70, and envelope depth of 20. For tone 2 the settings are milder; Lowpass filter (LPF) cutoff of 16, resonance of 20. Envelope depth remains at 30.

 

2) You should be hearing a fairly musical snarl. Now lets give you some control over the snarl. I use a pedal mapped to sys ctrl 1, but you could use a slider or joystick if you like. Go to Sys Ctrl page in the Patch Control Menu. In place of the volume mapping that is currently there for both tones, set cutoff of 4 for both tones, and resonance of 30 and 10 for tones 1&2 respectively. Now when you sweep the control, the filter will sweep and increase in resonance at the same time. Try it. You should hear the sound breaking up in a crinkly way near the upper end of the sweep. I like this but feel free to modify the sweep to your taste.

 

3) The patch is playable as is but try this go to the Amplifer (TVA) menu and in the TVA Time Env page, set V-T4 to +40 for both tones. This reduces he release time when you play staccato, making a much more musical patch for two-handed comping.

 

Well there you go, a fairly aggressive, snarly synth comping sound, vaguely reminiscent of a electric piano or clav, but nothing like the patch we started with. To continue playing with the booster, trying substiting different waveforms for both tones, and try different filter variations for tone 1. HPF in particular, yields some unique howl and snarls when tuned appropriately. Enjoy!

 

Now the Ring Modulator. Start with the patch you ended with after the booster treatment. We are now going to change this into a somewhat rubbery comping instrument thats going to make you love spanking those keys.

 

1) Go to patch common and set structure to 9. The booster is automatically defeated, so the booster setting is irrelevant.

2) Lets shape the tone in the filter section. Change Tone 1s filter to an LPF with a cutoff of 19, resonance of 20, keyfollow of 20 and envelope depth of 20. For tone 2 keep it as an LPF with a cutoff of 7, resonance of zero, keyfollow of 20 and envelope depth of 30

3) We are about to adjust the filter sensitivity to make the patch more playable. Scroll down to the TVF velocity sensitivity page and set a velocity sensitivity of 20 for both tones.

4) Since tone 1 is providing the brighter overtones, lets make sure that higher velocities provide for more of tone 1 relative to tone 2. Go to the TVA menu and set a velocity sensitivity of 60 for tone 1 and 30 for tone 2.

5) Now lets play with different relative pitches for both tones. I find that one octave and 1.5 octave difference work well. For this particular patch a pitch of 0 in tone 1 and 12 in tone 2 seems to do it for me. It gives a kind a of squarewave sound like a wurlie, but not exactly.

 

Well thats it. You still have the tonal control that you programmed into the booster version of this patch with Sys ctrl 2. For a crazy warbling version of this patch, go back to the filter menu and set tone1s filter to a BPF with resonance of 70. Now try sweeping the controller again. Dont worry, nothing is broken. It just sounds that way.

 

Let me know if this tutorial helps you to explore the booster and the ring modulator.

 

Jerry

 

PS: This was done on a JV/XP synth but should apply equally to Fantom/XV synths equally well. Do adjust the filter cutoffs to your taste after you are done. I used headphones doing this, and I notice I have to adjust my synth patches when moving from headphones to speakers.

[kanker.]

Just to add to this, I have owned one example of every Roland line/generation from the D-50 through the XV-88. Something I noticed from the XP series to the XV series is that something went wrong in the programming/translation from one platform to the next with regards to some legacy sounds. There were quite a few XP/JV sounds that were very poorly implemented in the XV-88, the most obvious and worst of these being the ancient yet very functional Nice Piano patch. I had to spend hours tweaking that thing to get it to sound comparable to the stock patch on my XP-80 and JV-1000.

 

I was very disappointed to find out how little Roland had done to improve/expand the stock wave ROM from the XP series to the XV series, just the fact that you still had to buy an expansion board to get a decent Rhodes sound was ridiculous. The Fantom series has gone a long way toward fixing these issues.

[Colin Miller]

OK, enough lurking. ;-)

 

The engine and sounds are pretty much the same in all the XV/JV series, just different packages for it. The 5080 however, has a far superior set of D/A converters than the rest in the series. It also has a superior FX engine.

[zephonic]

I have direct comparison. I'd say the XV5080 is still the best. It sounds a bit cleaner and wider than the JV family, and the FX are much better.

My Fantom X7 -incredibly- misses out on the honored JV/XV tradition of including all older patches in its soundset, and I feel that a lot of the presets were done in a hurry. It's capable of sounding great, but you'll have to put in some work.

My bet is that Eric Persings (of Spectrasonics and sound designer of many classic JV/XV patches) did not work on the Fantom-series.

[b3kys]

The XV-5080 has a few more banks of sounds plus the The first few banks are the same but there are a few added banks which have 128 patches each. the user patches are all different. You have the memory capacity of four roland S-760s. It has four expansion slots for the SR-JV-80 series and four slots for the SRX series expansion boards. Plus the GM sound set is general midi 2 not general midi 1. which is improved.

 

I own both the Fantom XR and the XV-5080 and if i were you i would get the 5080 and spend the few hundred dollars left over on soft synths or third party patches.