The BK9 is no longer. Why not put a touch screen on it...a vocal harmonizer...price it competitively...throw in more SN sounds with a sequencer...and then load it up with their great styles. Personally...I think they'd have something. But who am I. A lonely old jingle writer who registers sex offenders to make a living. I'll get off my soap box now.

jingleman [/quote]

If you want the full Roland sound, go integra7 combined with the roland cloud..

Absolutely agree.

Let me give my .02. The BK9 I believe was designed for the working musician more than the home player. I think it didn't sell as well as it should is because it is a Pros keyboard and most Arranger buyers are home players who want all kinds of extras. Weight, features, and price all point to that. I like mine so much I bought Bernies as a gig unit so my other could stay setup in my studio.
* Touch Screen-- do you really need it ? When I'm performing I can't be messing with making changes on a screen, hitting the wrong spot on the screen and then having the whole setup go South. Do this on my IPad all the time ! The BK9 has OTS which are easy to setup and very easy to access on the fly. Four for each Style, enough for any song. There are also Favorite sound lists for each section which again are easy to setup and use live. I've used these features playing with a band as well as a solo. As for editing there are some good free IPAd Apps which will give you touchscreen functionality
* Harmonizer - why build one in when the outboard ones are changing and improving constantly. Go simple or all out with whatever one you want. Me personally I've tried a few times to use one and its more of a distraction when playing and makes me feel more disconnected from the audience. Some use them to great effect but for the most part I haven't seen many.
* More sounds. Get the Integra 7 and your in Sound Heaven. For live work the BK9 has a good enough variety of quality sounds to go with.
The BK9 came in at a decent price and you can expand it all you want if you can find one. Add the IPAd, Harmonizer, and Integra and your still under a Genos price.

The BK9 is no longer. Why not put a touch screen on it...a vocal harmonizer...price it competitively...throw in more SN sounds with a sequencer...and then load it up with their great styles. Personally...I think they'd have something. But who am I. A lonely old jingle writer who registers sex offenders to make a living. I'll get off my soap box now.

jingleman [/quote]



The BK9 already has a decent sequencer... one of the reasons I switched from an EA7 to BK9..

I saw a couple used Integra 7s for under $1k, half their original price.

Thas because used hardware is becomming harder and harder to sell..
And prices are dropping appidly..

In general everything created the last decade sounds great..almost as good as the latest new instruments. The video can be seen as proof of that..

That‘s what I meant when I said in another recent thread that a few years are not the giant leap in development any more it was in the 1990s. More and more megabytes or gigabytes of sample data don‘t necessarily result in a totally different realism of sounds. We are approaching a kind of saturation of sample quality, where e.g. in a live situation, small samples don‘t sound so much worse than bigger ones.

Regarding BK9, I think the poor demand was largely irrationally motivated by catastrophic marketing and people being focused more on features like a big colour display than on sound quality.

It is just perplexing that a company as large as Roland piddles around with mediocre products like...GW7 (which I had) GW8...Prelude, when they could have packaged the Integra sounds in a nice arranger. Never played the bk9...but I can’t believe they couldn’t have beefed it up a little to make it a major competitor in the market place.

Alright....I promise to slither back to my little studio and dream of a day when Roland releases that new product (arranger) that Fran teased us about.

jingleman

At that time there was still the strict separation between Roland Japan and Italy-based Roland Europe. GW7 and 8 were arrangers from Japan, and they didn‘t use some samples which had obviously been developed by Roland Europe exclusively for their arrangers (E-80, BK series). BK-9 was the last instrument developed by Roland Europe, and it included this small selection of 22 SuperNatural instruments from the Jupiters and Integra.
I think Roland has always been afraid of including too many of their new sounds in the factory sounds of their instruments, probably a mistake. I owned the BK-9, and NO, they did NOT include many SRX sounds in the factory ROM, in fact almost none of the SRX 04, 06 and 10 (I analysed the tone list thoroughly). Then, they announced expansions for the BK-9 which never came.
There‘s also a problem with the sound processor regarding SuperNatural sounds, this might be the reason why they just included 22 of them. It‘s a common issue of the Integra, too: too many SN-A sounds simultaneously result in timing issues, the processor can‘t manage the workload, as there is physical modeling involved.

Rachel you may be correct, but I read that there were over 500 sounds taking from the SRX and Fantom collection.

While switching performances on the BK9 that used all Supernatural tones, I did have glitches in maintaining the sounds from one performance to the other.. I believe it is the processors inability to handle the data.. Since it includes MXF changes too..

When I use the Integra7 with 16 SN parts while playing big band sequences.. (assigned instruments and no program changes or gm and gm2 resets)… there are no timing problems or glitches .


Same results with the above settings in style play on my G70.. No glitches on the Integra7.. Most likely for folks that are having timing problems, program changes and system exclusive come into play..


In the past I had timing issues with my xv5080 and G1000..