Last sunday I was on an exposition where also Roland had a stand. The Discover 5 was standing there and I played it for a while. A short review: The V-Notes have been left out, which make the sounds mainly equal to the G-series. But it has great MIDI editing capabilities, even while playing live! The touch screen is still there, but the navigation has been improved a lot and the graphics layout is simplified, there are also buttons now on both sides of the screen, but they just select parts, and not the corresponding numbers on the screen. The Discover 5 came with 40 special Midi files which fit to a certain song. That was sounding great and so real!! While playing the SMF, the keyboard was showing the chord played. Easy for use when you want to improvise. Also the Discover 5 contained some song-specified styles. Then we had a realtime vocalizer, which could make you sound like an entire choir by just one press of the button. Making your voice sounding like a robot is neither no problem. Before I played the board, 2 guys were playing, also to try out. One sang and one played. That was sounding very well.. The singer was using the microphone in a very good way.. Also, I found that the keyboardplayer was playing better than me (using more blackkeys). He told me that he just played for 2 years now.. I maybe should get lessons again while I realize that I play 13 years now..

And a very important question to me:
I know that there are sites which sell styles especially for the VA series which make a song sounding more realistic. Does any of you know any?



[This message has been edited by Sander (edited 11-26-2002).]

Sander, www.styles-music.de sells excellent styles for the Roland G1000; they play very well on the VA7 and you can always tweak the sounds, if you like.

Hi Sander Great to see you posting again here. I assume your hand is fully recovered and that you're back in FULL SWING playing the keys (including the black ones hopefully too). - Scott

I assumed the Discover was not an arranger, so does it play styles?

S.

Scott, yes! Everything is back in place again now for a while!

Andrea, thank you for the URL! Very interesting!




Correct, the Discover does not play styles like you would expect from an arranger. But it is able to play the drums part at least as far as I know.


[This message has been edited by Sander (edited 11-28-2002).]

Correct the Diskcover5 is a none arranger. The idea is that you can load in a midi file. Decide how many bars of the midi file make up the Verse...Chorus and other parts the midi file uses to build up the song. Any of these parts can then be assigned to buttons provided. This enable you to loop back and forth to different parts of the song that you would be playing live the melody part to.
This is a very clever feature and could possible be an advantage if this type of thing was added to the next new Roland Arranger in 2003.

Graham UK

Load a midi file and split it back up into Intro / Verse / Chorus etc??????????

This sounds horribly like hard work - with the midi files I use I'd have to edit them [to remove the "here comes the ..." fills at the end of verse / chorus sections] before use in this way.

Yes, you can read it 2 ways. But I did not meant to say that the Discover 5 was an arranger.

Meanwhile Roland has also e-mailed me! They suggested these sites for the VA series:
www.rolandsoftware.com www.technote.com www.midispot.dk

MacAllcock:
Yes, that's also what I did. And sometimes this does work, as long as the midi file is played in a key like C, Cb or C#. I'm not able to transfer a Cm for instance to a C key (I don't think that's possible either ) Another point; I don't have midi-notation software.


[This message has been edited by Sander (edited 11-29-2002).]