Roland’s gone from the pro/advanced arranger market. With sales being low and development costs being high, I would be gobsmacked to see them reenter such a dwindling market. Others are having huge problems (Korg’s flagship is a hot mess of bugs, missing features and almost complete lack of communication from the company) and to be honest, I would not be surprised to see more of them leaving. Korg probably… they have nothing in the MOTL market but the 7 year old PA1000, with none of the technology from the PA5x, and let’s be honest, it’s sales of the midline that provide the R&D budget primarily, so probably a root cause of why bugfixing and refinement of the PA5x has been so slow.

My last hope from Roland might be an app for a tablet that either addresses their synth/workstation hardware, or a software ROMpler. The kids no more want to snap up an arranger than we wanted to gig with a home organ back in the 70’s and 80’s! Polysynths were the ‘cool’ keyboards, and while Prophet5’s and Oberheim’s ruled the airwaves, none of us wanted to be seen as young 20 something’s playing a home organ rocking an Enka beat!

The asteroid has already hit us, it’s just taking time for us all to go extinct! 🦖