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#144855 - 12/17/04 03:08 AM
Re: Got the Roland G-70 manual
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Member
Registered: 10/02/04
Posts: 113
Loc: UK
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Downloaded the French version of the manual yesterday, and hd a quick flip through it.
Despite my limited commnd of French, it proved very useful straight away, as it has enabled me to clarify a couple of points of importance.
First, the good news:
The Rotary Speaker (Leslie) FX DOES have separate bass & treble rotor settings. The sounds on the demo that Roland has released do not seem to have made use of the available settings but, amongst other things, it has separate settings for slow & fast speed avaialble for the treble & bass rotors. The acceleration & deceleration rates for each rotor can also be individually set. So it seems possible to have the bass rotor with a slow spin up & spin down rate, whilst the treble rotor can have an almost immediate change of speed - just like the real thing does. There were other fine - tuning settings available also.
Now the bad news:
It seems that Roland have totally cocked up (technical term!) the style control section yet again.
The much vaunted "6 Fill Ins" cannot be freely triggered. This explains why you do not see six (or even 3 x 2 variations) Fill In buttons on the front panel. In fact, there is not even ONE button available to trigger a fill when you want it!
Each of the six fill patterns is permanently associated with a change from one main style variation to another, and can only be accessed by changing from one variation to another slightly in advance of the point where you want the new main variation to begin. This is done under automatic control. This will probably work OK in some musical situations, but you can bet on finding circumstances where you can't do what you want within a day of buying a G70.
There is seeming some limited addition control available via the FC7 footpedal socket, where half bar fills and fill-back-to-same-variation appears to be available. This additional control may also be partially available via other physical controls, such as the D-Beam or the programmable pads (2 of).
Further, it seems that a particular fill pattern is inextricably linked to it's associated main style variation. This means that you could not - for example - trigger a fill pattern that is associated with variation one, when changing from variation three to variation four.
The only way I can see to get round this SEVERE limitation would be to clone several versions of a particular complete style and do a rewrite on the clones. Each version would require you to copy the various fill patterns into different locations within the style divisions. What a load of hard work!
Further bad news is that, once again, there only seem to be 3 chord-driven pattern variations per style division - major, minor, and seventh. Primitive, or what! It's all very the instrument well being able to recognise umpteen different chords, but not much use if they are then mapped to a pattern which is musically innapropriate.
This is just not good enough on an instrument of this class.
I am really frustrated by these findings, as the G70 is an instrument I really wanted to like. After the abysmal VA range (I own a VA76) it looked, at first sight, as if Roland had actually paid some attention to what customers were saying and made a big effort with this one.
Even more frustrating is that they seem to have put a lot of effort into all sorts of aspects of the machine, 90% of which looks really good, but failed totally on these most basic of issues.
It's almost as if the designers have never seen any other brand of instrument. There are just so many examples out there - available for years, and at far less cost - of how to do it so much better, and simpler too!
Regards - Mike
[This message has been edited by MikeTV (edited 12-17-2004).]
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