I have had the Roland BK-9 now for a week and have been able to spend 6 to 8 hours a day with it. I am not a Roland Guru but I am always willing to try a new product. The following review is from the perspective of a player who relies on the ARRANGER features, factory styles, and factory sounds to be used for live performances. I do not play piano style using the full keyboard so the 61 keys was not important to me. Nor do I sample sounds, create styles, compose music, or do much of anything else but play the keyboard in arranger mode with a split keyboard making use of the OTS sounds. I am not a singer so those features used by singers are not important to me. What I look for in any keyboard is it’s ease of use, quality sounds that actually sound like the real instrument, usable styles for the type of music I play, and tools which are easy to use to make simple changes to RH lead voices and EQ settings. I have owned, and gigged with, all of the following keyboards. Yamaha PSR3000, Tyros 3, Tyros 4 and PSR S950. Korg PA1X, PA2XPro, PA600, and PA900. Roland E50, E80, and BK-7M. My sound system is a Bose L1 Compact speaker. Sometimes I use very good stereo headphones. My review will be based on how the BK-9 compares to these keyboards and my experience with them.

KEY FEEL: Better then most and much better then the S950. The BK-9 keys seem to respond quicker than all the others – very fast passages seem easier to play. There is a very solid feel to the keys.

EASE OF USE: No keyboard beats any of the Korgs I have owned for ease of use. I would have to rate the BK-9 at the bottom of the list in this category. The menus run deep, are not intuitive, at least to me, and are useless for making on the fly changes
during live playing. The OS is a challenge to learn compared to Korg’s. The general button layout is ok and did not take a lot of time learn. I do not like the rotary dial used to make selections from the menus. Seems very clumsy to me. Even Yamaha’s button system is better to me.

SCREEN: The screen is small but easy to see. However, I have yet to understand why Roland decided to use two small screens rather than a good touch screen system. Roland claims the two screens can be used to do two things at the same time or at least view multiple things at the same time. That actually is true but I have not yet figured out how that is an advantage for live playing or better than a good touch screen.

USER MANUAL: Believe it or not I found it very useful but hardly complete. Seems like Roland writers have written the manual from the perspective the reader should already know how to use the keyboard. Roland was more interested in touting the new features of the BK-9 rather then provide a good “lets get started” type guide. I think the Yamaha user guides provided a better how to get started section.

STYLES: Where do I start? First of all, I do not play modern style music and it is getting harder to find styles on all of the keyboards which match up with the music I play. My gig lists are designed to please the 60-90 age group. This puts a heavy demand for great Big Band styles, Dixieland styles, Country styles, Swing styles, Boogie styles, Waltz styles, 50’s Rock Styles and Latin styles. The catch is, these styles cannot be “in your face” loud or harsh in nature. The instrumentation and rhythm section of the styles must be realistic. One of the first things I look for is the keyboard’s ability to play legacy styles which often are a better fit for my needs. I have a collection of over 10,000 Roland styles including the BK-7M, E50, E80, and Prelude styles and they do not play well on the BK-9! Some do not even load! Those that will play would require so much work to be useful it is not worth the time. How about the factory styles – variations 1 and 2 are pretty good on all of them. Variation 3 is way to busy on a lot of them and variation 4 is a total mess on most of them. (sorry, but that is what I am hearing when I audition styles.) Oh yes, I am not happy with how Roland organizes the styles. For instance they have country styles in various categories making it hard to find things.


GENERAL EQ SETTINGS: Out of the box the BK-9 was extremely bass heavy to the point of sounding muddy. I turned off the EQ settings and that made a big difference. But I have not yet found a suitable EQ mix that makes everything on the keyboard sound good.
To be fair, I don’t know a lot about mixing and EQ settings. So a lot of this issue might be user error. But there is another side to this. Roland has provided super useful tools to get all this right if you know what you are doing. My question to Roland is, where is the
simple adjustment system for those of us who are not sound engineers???? But, I’ll keep working on it. Yamaha has all these keyboards beat for providing simple to use and understand EQ adjustment settings.

SPEAKER SYSTEM: There are no built-in speakers. Speakers would have been nice and provide a great on-stage monitoring system.

NEAT FEATURES: I like the D-BEAM CONTROLLER. It is easy to use and easy to setup. It is neat that you can save 10 of your FAVORITE SOUNDS and can recall them at the touch of a button. However, you can do the same thing on Yamaha keyboards using registrations and can have as many sets of 8 sounds as you want. One thing the BK-9 does is allow you to save 10 favorite sounds for all 4 sounds of the style. The BK-9 has the best THUMB DRIVE PLACEMENT of all the keyboards. HARMONIC BARS – what a neat concept provided you are in love with organ sounds and use them often. So far, when I tried them I found them to be extremely ‘Shrill’ and voiced in extreme ranges and Roland has used them in styles where they just don’t belong. All of this can be adjusted but right now this is not a priority for me. Other organ sounds also seem to be harsh and totally out of balance with the styles. Again, this can be adjusted - but why are these things not corrected at the factory? Don’t get me wrong here. I absolutely love the B3 stuff, but the out-of-the-box setup for the organ sounds is terrible. ASSIGNABLE SWITCHES – 4 of them with a variety of useful settings for just about anything you might need. Location of the switches could have been better.

GLOBAL SETTINGS: I want the keyboard split point and the OTS to remain on all the time unless I purposely turn it off. I have not found a place yet in Global settings where these can be set and locked. The result is various styles turn them off or on. I think I have simply overlooked where this can be set but it should not be this hard to locate. There are other settings I have set that return to factory default on a restart. The manual indicates Global settings are automatically saved when changed but I am not sure that is 100% true.

MIXER 10 SLIDER SYSTEM: I have not yet figured out how to use these properly. The sliders assigned to R1 and R2 work really great out-of–the-box. I can’t tell much difference in sound when trying the other sliders so far. This could very well be that I don’t know how to use them properly. One thing I don’t like about them is if they are in the down position and you move them the sound stops and you have to move them to the full up position to get the sound back. There must be a setting for this somewhere!!!!

MAKEUP TOOLS: It seems to me Roland has complicated using the makeup tools. I remember on the E50 it was very simple to just select a category from a list and the changes were made to the rhythm in question. Admittedly, now there seems to be many
more adjustments that can be made but that has added complexity.

MUSIC ASSISTANT: The music assistant supplied by Roland cannot be edited or deleted. Why???? You can create your own music assistant files and save them to the thumb drive.

FEATURES I DON’T USE OR HAVE NOT YET USED:
Audio Loops, Audio Recorder, Midi Recorder, 16 Track Sequencer, Chord Sequencer, Wireless Lan Connection, Assignable Foot Switches other than Hold, Rhythm Composer, Microphone adjustments.

I hope readers have found this of use. To the best of my knowledge what I have written is accurate. If not, please feel free to add corrections or advice in follow-up posts.

Deane

... virtually all manufacturers fail ( on purpose ?) to get the balance right between the most elementary things such as the respective volumes of RH sounds, LH sounds and the volumes of the acc. tracks.