Roland E a7 for sale, look in Buy and Sell.
John C

John, sorry the ea7 didn’t work out. Looks like it would take quite an effort to master.

Nowadays, they ALL do! 😂🤯

I think the days of turning them on and being able to control them intuitively have long gone.

Mind you, Roland made the job FAR harder than it needed to be, offering zero sampler content and a tiny selection of multipad content. Laziness, pure and simple. You don’t see Yamaha, Korg and Ketron forcing their users to come up with basic content. I sincerely hope the moron at Roland Corp. that made this decision got fired… 🙄🤬

No, it is not Roland, it is my 89 years – the brain is not the same. Actually, I made some nice progress. I have enough music programed for an hour of my favorites.

Take care, John C.

I have no use for a sampler, so I'm not too bummed about that.
Honestly if the multipads could be triggered via MIDI command (and also send their output via MIDI channel), I would buy an E-A7. Not only did they provide minimal multipad content, but as far as I know there is almost no MIDI integration with the pads! It's like they were an eleventh-hour addition. Very frustrating!!

John, I applaud your initiative. If I had half as much...I’d be grateful.
Mitch

I think the idea of MIDI multipads being the primary use kind of slipped by Roland. In fairness, importing audio loops to the multipads is pretty easy, and it may just have been assumed that the EA7 was going to be bought primarily by ethnic music players (which certainly make up a decent share of Korg’s base) who are likely to have a decent ethnic drum and percussion loop library ready to be imported.

But yes, almost all the new EA7 ‘features’ looked tacked on at the last minute. Which they probably were! Roland closed down Roland Italy’s R&D team, moved production of the arrangers to China and design back to Japan, and obviously didn’t seem to have kept anybody significantly involved in arranger design from Europe.

Roland Japan probably knew for quite a while that multipads and a sampler were the main areas their competitors had them beat cold, and Roland Italy seemed stubbornly clinging to refusing to add them (and that’s a whole other question that might have been one reason they all got fired). But given how suddenly this all went down, and the obvious animosity from the Italian team at being dumped so unceremoniously, I think Roland Japan’s team were left to basically figure it all out from scratch. A tall order, given Yamaha and Korg’s huge lead in those areas.

The biggest headscratcher of the whole thing was Roland Japan not using their old S-series sample format as well as .WAV. Given only 128MB of RAM, it was a no-brainer to use Roland’s extensive (and quite excellent) library designed in the 90’s for their S-series samplers, as they maxed out at 128MB.

It’s hard to find sound designers today willing to do the considerable work needed to squeeze high quality sounds into very little RAM, but that was the only option back then. So Roland are sitting on a huge library of compact data sounds, but forgot to allow the EA7 to be able to import them. Such a missed opportunity to monetize stuff they’ve had sitting on the shelves for years…

I’ve got some really excellent translations of those Roland samples for my Kurzweil K2500 (also 128MB RAM) and they are some wonderful sounds.

Such a missed opportunity. It seems all but assured that Roland have abandoned mid and upper level arrangers, and I honestly feel that the multipad and sampler fiascos were the nail in the coffin. The EA7 is an excellent START to a new direction, but it needed a quick follow up to address the problems, and it never came.

For the want of a nail…

I had two Roland EA-7's in the past so, I gave it 2 chances but failed, and the main reason I sold them was very hard operating system to learn and the sampler very limited, I loved some sounds like the drums and accordions and the fact that the keyboard was light in weight other then that I couldn't go on a job and play with the EA-7 by itself, heck I can buy a KORG EK-50 for under 500 bucks and do a better job, by the way you can find a used EA-7 in Europe for under 400 euro they are not popular and because of the economy, players are selling.

My fear of an ea7 is that as soon as I try one, they'll change the design to a preferred single screen and the dual will become worthless for resale
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I think the odds of Roland coming out with a new arranger to supersede the EA7 are basically nil. It’s already over six YEARS. If they had any interest in the segment at all, they’d have already made one.

Actually, the dual screen works quite well, albeit a bit small. But after the big touch screen of the G70, I thought I’d never like the BK-9’s dual, but having lyrics on one screen and registration selection on the other works out very well in a live situation. No current arranger with a touch screen let’s you pick and choose what gets displayed, it’s all preset screens, so all in all it’s a bit of a push.

I rather wish my BK-9 had that army of little buttons surrounding the screens. It works rather well, and kept Yamaha players happy for decades before they went touch screen.

If fear of a new model is what’s keeping you from picking up a nice cheap used EA7, forget it. Roland are FINISHED with arrangers, at least pro ones. They’ll still make hobbyist ones at the low end, they really don’t need to innovate there. But Yamaha and Korg are so far ahead in market share, it would take a massive reinvestment to put themselves back in the game.

I think it’s safe to say the EA7 was the last serious arranger Roland will make, and quite honestly, given a choice between a used EA7 and a used BK-9, I would recommend the BK-9 every time…

Jingleman, thank you for your kind words.

I want to thank the rest of you for helping me sell my keyboard. If the keyboard matched your needs, the price would be much higher. Songs on the Box Net by some of our best players sounded more than great; Don for one.

eBay listed prices: $1,273— $1,304
Reverb listed prices: $1,304 --- $1,449

I am asking, $875.00, sounds like a great deal. I have not even mentioned the extras. It took 18 minutes to down load them.

John C.

John your price is more than fair. If I didn't already have a BK-9 I would at least try the E-A7 for a while. It's not a "bad" arranger. Heck, it's superior to Roland's own BK-5 in every way, and that was a professional-grade arranger that's still being sold new for $1000 MSRP. If someone really wanted to put time in to create phrases, the multipads are a worthwhile feature. And the convenient size and weight were already mentioned.

Roland's days as one of "the big three" arranger makers look to be over. Like the late great offerings from Technics, I have a feeling that the E-A7 and BK-9 will be even more appreciated in the future than they are now!

Great price John, GLWS.

I have to admit, if I were forced to play the BK-9 for the rest of my career, it would not be a problem..!

So far, nothing else at any price has the same combination of sounds, features and light weight with an excellent keybed. Roland went out on a high note with this one.

It’s just disappointing that they didn’t follow through on the EA7, which was a decent start of a new generation. And it’s primarily content that holds the EA7 back. Feature-wise, it’s got most of what we wanted except that damn break/fill! But a handful of MIDI multipads and zero audio ones don’t cut it…

A BK-9 with the EA7’s sampler and multipads (with more RAM and a ton of content) would have been a serious alternative to TOTL Yamaha’s and Korg’s that cost a lot more (remember, the BK-9 was closer in price to S950’s and PA1000’s than Genos’s and PA4X-76’s).

The Roland Ea7 is not for sale any longer.
John C.

John, Is it sold or did you decide to keep it?

Montunoman, thank you for asking. My original thought was to sell at a reduced price for a fast sale. SZ is the only place I placed the for sale.

So to answer your question: No I still have it. I have to smile when I walk into my studio, the Ea7 has so many buttons and lights, that it draws me into learning again.

Other than Genos and Korg Pa4x, there is nothing that interests me

But I am having fun in my 89th year, John C.

With so many great keyboards out there, why limit yourself to one? I think it's crazy some guys have more than one of the same model. I guess it makes practical sense for a working musician to have a back up, just in case of an emergency, but how boring!

Enjoy your Yamaha and Roland set up, sounds like loads of fun to me!

I’ve always felt that Yamaha and Roland were a perfectly matched pair. It seems the strengths of one covers the weakness in the other, and in many categories, BOTH have really excellent but different sounds.

So if you are into layering things, strings, horns, woodwinds etc., you can be assured that not only are both sounds good, but they are based on utterly different samples, with different sample crossover points and velocity crossover points, which leads to a really interesting and evolving sound as you play dynamically across the keyboard.

It’s a great way to put a realistic orchestra or big band together where any slight flaws in one are covered up by the other… With the benefit that you’re not chewing up polyphony in one keyboard layering a bunch of stereo stuff..!

The icing on the cake is that you can probably get one keyboard to send the PC# to the other keyboard so BOTH setups are called up in one go.