Hammer,

Does the BK-7m have any "free-play" styles like the Ethereal Movie, or On Broadway that are on Tyros4?

Any Slow Blues styles?

Ian

Hi Donny,
I'll try to get it done tomorrow but it might be Wednesdy.

Hammer

Ian, no free play styles that I have found but some pretty good slow blues stuff. I'll try to put together a styles demo the next few days.

Hammer

Appreciate it Hammer....I'm sure people are curious besides me to hear the Bk7m.

Thanks Hammer...it would be great if any of the Roland gurus out there (you listening, Fran?) could make a few (or at least one) Free-Play styles on their G-70, that could also be used in the BK-7m.

If Roland's Style Creator is as good as it's made out to be, then making a Free-Play style should be easy.

I remember the very first Slow Blues style that I thought sounded authentic was on a Roland arranger (G-800 I think) ...of course, the other companies now have them as well, but Roland had the first really good one, in my opinion.

Looking forward to your demos.

Ian

You can opt to have them change automatically with the variations, or not to change. You can trigger fills at any time by pressing the variation button. If you're on Var 1, for example, pressing Var 1 button will fill to self.
DonM

I haven't even listened to synth lead sounds. What I'm referring to mostly are the bread and butter sounds such as guitar, piano, brass, sax, as set up in the OTS memories. There are some excellent Electric Piano and organ setups as well as nice string and vocal layers.
Every sound is extremely editable. For instance you can take a guitar sound and work with the e.q., reverb, delay, enhancer, distortion, overdrive, amp simulation and more. What you can do to a sound is pretty much unlimited. On some of the sounds you can trigger various effects with touch, key pressure and/or after touch.
On organ you can change such things as the speed of the rotary on Leslie simulation, the start-up rotary time and wind-down time. You can make it clean or various degrees of "dirty", including types and degrees of percussion. I haven't gotten into doing much of it, but Roland has on some of the OTS presets.
I believe they have implemented a lot of this better than they did on previous boards.

DonM

Yes that I know. But can the fills/variations of the BK 7m be triggered by a master keyboard instead of using the FC 7 pedal.

I for one would love to see a free play style... I'm not sure it's even possible! I have an E-50 and have tried, mostly without success. The biggest barrier to success is that no Rolands that I know of have a "retrigger" parameter in their style creation section. So when the style contains long, sustained string and organ notes, the arranger reacts inconsistently when you release and play a new chord before the end of the measure.

Diki and I explored this, and I believe we independently concluded the retrigger parameter is buried in the tone itself (search our posts here and on roland-arranger.com

I like the Roland sounds and the factory styles are fine. Some are Excellent! But the only way I can think of to make a freestyle is to audition ALL of the factory styles, mix and match string parts, tweak a note here and there, etc. Basically ASSEMBLE the style from existing parts.

Although theoretically possible, I found that to try to create a freestyle from scratch is frustrating. There are some parameters (like Retrigger) which the factory just does not provide access to through the interface. They are not even mentioned in the manual. And there are no 3rd party tools (like CASM edit for Yamahas) to use undocumented features.

BTW, the BK-7m does not have on-board style creation, so you would have to create the style on an E-50, G-70, etc. And while style creation was added to the Prelude and the GW-8 with Version 2.00, it's very limited and crude- not nearly as good as the tools on E-50, G-70, G-1000, etc. Maybe they could release some software to go with the module, which allows a user to create styles. As Hammer said, PC software could be both more capable AND more user-friendly than the on-board software of any current arranger.

If and when Roland does bring out another TOTL arranger, style creation parameters are one area they need to expand. Just look at the manuals for Yamaha, Korg, Ketron, even the new Casio's. Especially the section on style creation and all of the detailed parameters which Rolands lack. Not brand-bashing, just pointing out a source of frustration for me personally. -Ted

I know it's my imagination, but I could swear this thing sounds better since I installed vl.05. I AM starting to gain new respect for this module, especially the instrument voices (tones). Don's right about the pianos and organs. About as good as you're going to find on an arranger. I've been able to modify about 5-6 of the styles I'm likely to use, and the results have been very satisfying. Some only required a tempo change. Yep, it's starting to grow on me.

chas