Roland Fan, George,
I certainly hope that this is not the demise of the Roland line of the arranger keyboards. Over the years they have come up with a number of good instruments, with some cutting edge features. I am a Roland user myself.
However, if Roland's line of arranger keyboards dies, this will be of Roland's own doing. For years I have been griping about way of doing business, where they are eager to spend money and effort on publishing useless "magazines", which tell us how Britney Spears' keyboard players use their keyboards (it's all recorded in their shows anyways), rather than LISTEN to us, people using the instruments for enjoyment and income. Their flashy web site does not have a way for the US users to contact the company. I would have gladly written to them with the list of my suggestions for a really useful instrument, as I am sure many of you would have. This way Roland could have come up with the instrument which would be enticing for people to switch to. Instead, they kept telling themselves and everybody else how great they were, and IMHO, have missed the boat. Their current line of VA (and EM) instruments is way behind the state of the art as far as features go, and I find that each new instrument makes a step forward and a step back at the same time. While I understand Roland's desire to cut costs, to me it still looks like they don't know what we need, because they don't listen.
Roland seems committed to large, bulky chassis, touch screen, variphrase, zillions of mostly-average sounds, and ZIP drive, while we want a compact, easy to carry instrument, lots of buttons, a vocal harmonizer, a few hundred of stand out sounds, and a hard disk (or even a Flash card).
There used to be time when the difference in sounds and styles between the high end and low end determined whether the instrument was performance-grade or "home"-use only. These days, even a few hundred $ buys a keyboard which has quite passable sound samples and styles. The difference which sets aside high-end instruments is not only in sounds and styles as in features. With the proliferation of computers, the capabilities of an on-board sequencer have also taken a secondary role, but we need a better-than-MIDI way of interfacing between the keyboard and a compter (say USB 2.0, which can carry multi-channel digital audio, as well as hundreds of MIDI channels).
In my daytime work I see how a major corporation brings out new products. The ones which are successful are the ones which are developed with the input from the users. The same will hold true for Roland. Studio professionals may have provided valuable input for the design of the successfull JX an JV series. Yet most of them know nothing about the way we, the real pros
, the wedding singers
, the one-man bands
use our instruments, and which features we need. Roland won't know until they listen to us. And until they do, they will not be missed in the marketplace.
Regards,
Alex
) .
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