I think the idea of MIDI multipads being the primary use kind of slipped by Roland. In fairness, importing audio loops to the multipads is pretty easy, and it may just have been assumed that the EA7 was going to be bought primarily by ethnic music players (which certainly make up a decent share of Korg’s base) who are likely to have a decent ethnic drum and percussion loop library ready to be imported.

But yes, almost all the new EA7 ‘features’ looked tacked on at the last minute. Which they probably were! Roland closed down Roland Italy’s R&D team, moved production of the arrangers to China and design back to Japan, and obviously didn’t seem to have kept anybody significantly involved in arranger design from Europe.

Roland Japan probably knew for quite a while that multipads and a sampler were the main areas their competitors had them beat cold, and Roland Italy seemed stubbornly clinging to refusing to add them (and that’s a whole other question that might have been one reason they all got fired). But given how suddenly this all went down, and the obvious animosity from the Italian team at being dumped so unceremoniously, I think Roland Japan’s team were left to basically figure it all out from scratch. A tall order, given Yamaha and Korg’s huge lead in those areas.

The biggest headscratcher of the whole thing was Roland Japan not using their old S-series sample format as well as .WAV. Given only 128MB of RAM, it was a no-brainer to use Roland’s extensive (and quite excellent) library designed in the 90’s for their S-series samplers, as they maxed out at 128MB.

It’s hard to find sound designers today willing to do the considerable work needed to squeeze high quality sounds into very little RAM, but that was the only option back then. So Roland are sitting on a huge library of compact data sounds, but forgot to allow the EA7 to be able to import them. Such a missed opportunity to monetize stuff they’ve had sitting on the shelves for years…

I’ve got some really excellent translations of those Roland samples for my Kurzweil K2500 (also 128MB RAM) and they are some wonderful sounds.

Such a missed opportunity. It seems all but assured that Roland have abandoned mid and upper level arrangers, and I honestly feel that the multipad and sampler fiascos were the nail in the coffin. The EA7 is an excellent START to a new direction, but it needed a quick follow up to address the problems, and it never came.

For the want of a nail…