From: dean@image.soe.clarkson.edu (Dean Swan) Subject: D-70 info - part 1 Date: 1 Feb 90 16:19:49 GMT Ok, as promised, here is the info on the D-70. I'll post part 2 tomorrow. -Dean ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- D-70 Super LA Synthesizer The D-70 Super LA Synthesizer is a powerful 76-key, multi-timbral keyboard featuring unique sound creation capabilities, innovative performance features, and incredible new sounds. The D-70 introduces a new approach to the "Linear Arithmetic" concept, enabling you to develop complex, exceptional sounds and providing a new level of creative flexibility which makes it the perfect instrument for live performers or for studio musicians who need instant, complete control over sounds. With its extensive multi-band filtering capabilities, the new DLM (Differential Loop Modulation) process which creates thousands of new distinctive, modulated waveforms, and a wide selection of new PCM samples, the D-70 provides you with extraordinary power. The revolutionary Tone Pallette editing system makes it easy to create new sounds instantly by allowing you to modify main synthesizer parameters such as level, attack, release, resonance, cutoff, and panning. By pressing a single button on the D-70's front panel, you can use the Tone Pallette's four sliders to control parameters for any four Tones at once. No other synthesizer offers you such power and flexibility. The D-70 also contains a wide variety of impressive performance functions. Offering a large 40-digit x 8-line LCD which makes operation and editing easy and full MIDI control capabilities, the D-70 is the ideal master keyboard for any MIDI system. The keyboard lets you control release velocity in real time, in addition to velocity and channel aftertouch, and responds to polyphonic aftertouch through MIDI, giving you incredible expressive responsiveness. The Tone Pallette can be operated in real time as well, providing even greater expressive possibilities. The D-70 contains PCM wave data, such as white noise, spectrums, and sawtooth waves, that can be used as sound elements. A variety of high- quality, multi-sampled PCM sounds including pianos, brass, guitars, drums and distinctive synthesizer textures are provided internally as well. In addition, a new sound card developed exclusively for the D-70 features a large selection of PCM wave sound elements. The D-70 is also compatible with SN-U110 Series Sound Cards which provide access to a variety of exceptional multi-sampled instrument sounds that may be used as is, or edited as desired. Waveforms from the external cards as well as from internal PCM sounds can be modified extensively, giving you incredible power for creating sounds. DLM (Differential Loop Modulation), a unique, new editing feature can be used to truncate a waveform and process it with loop modulation. This allows you to create a wide assortment of totally new waveforms from the original PCM wave. These waveforms can then be filtered with a high-quality multi-band TVF filter. The D-70 enables you to control and modify sounds at every level, giving you the ability to create unique, sophisticated, and personalized sounds never available before. ENHANCED SOUND SOURCES ---------------------- Superb Selection of Built-In PCM Sounds The D-70 includes a variety of sound elements such as white noise, sawtooth wave, and PCM short loop sounds, similar to those of the other D-Series synthesizers. In addition to these versatile sound elements, the D-70 contains a wide selection of multi-sampled PCM sounds ranging from lifelike acoustic instruments to analog and digital synth textures that offer sound quality comparable to professional samplers. The D-70 also allows you to modify these PCM sounds using DLM and TVF filtering for an even greater range of tonal possibilities. Dedicated PCM Sound Elements Card and SN-U110 Series Sound Card Library. In addition to the D-70's internal sound elements, a completely new Sound Card designed exclusively for the unit featuring PCM sound elements such as white noise and sawtooth waves can be inserted in the D-70's two ROM card slotsfor additional creative possibilities. The D-70 is also compatible with SN-U110 Series sound cards, a diverse collection of multi-sampled PCM sounds. PCM wave sound elements from the dedicated cards and sounds >from SN-U110 Series cards can also be TVF-filtered on the D-70 allowing you to create an even wider variety of sounds. DLM (Differential Loop Modulation) Enhances Sound Creation DLM is a revolutionary feature that allows you to truncate PCM waveforms, define the start point and loop length, then process the waveforms with loop modulation, resulting in wave data with a new harmonic structure. The mode, start point, and loop length of the waveform can be set to create integral or non-integral harmonics, producing sounds that span the entire frequency range. The D-70's built-in PCM waveforms provide the raw materials suitable for effective filtering and DLM radically alters the harmonics of these waveforms prior to the TVF filtering stage. By using a single PCM wave to create a varitey of different waveforms, DLM produces random, modulated sounds completely different from the original similar to a ring modulation effect. With these high level editing possibilities, you can build sounds from the ground up and customize PCM waveforms with unprecedented control. From: Commander Brett Maraldo Subject: Re: A D-70. Yeah. Or a WS. Hmm. Maybe a D-70... I have owned a D70 for 7 months now. Let me tell you about it. First, the voice architecture: first you start with a 'tone'. A tone is a PCM sample that has an associated pitch ENV, Filter and env, and amplifier and env. Once you have your tones created you assemble up to 4 of them into a patch. A patch is 1 to 4 tones layered, or plit over the keyboard. Tones can be set to vel switch or mix. Once the patches are created you can specify up to 5 of these in a multi-timbral 'performance'. A performance is a set of five patches mapped to various midi channels, volumes and effects routings. the 6th voice in a performance is for the rhythm section. The rhythm section is actually quite powerful: you can specify, for each of the 76 keys, all the parameters of a tone. that is, there are 76 tones specifically mapped to the keys in order for the rhythm section so once you have your basic kits programmed you can create other unusual sounds and use those in the rhythm section (reversed sounds, elctronic zings and zaps, etc). In my setup, I have local off set. In the past (as of a week ago) I would just play the keyboard and not care what channel the D70 was sending on because I would tell my sequencer to send all notes to a specific midi channel, controlling the performance patches or other midi devices. But I have been using the MIDI OUT page recently and now see how the D70 is a superior controller. With the MIDI OUT page you can, by a one button press, specify either LAYER, SPLIT, or ZONE mapping. You can also select which channel a zone will send on. And, you can turn out-sones on an off with the zone buttons: s s s s upper 1 ch x mode l l l l upper 2 ch y sw/mix/norm i i i i lower 1 ch z mode d d d d lower 2 ch $ sw/mix/norm e e e e r r r r ZONE LAYER SPLIT slider are physical sliders * * * * * * * * are physical buttons You use the alpha-dial (data dial to select the channels the various zones of the keyboard will send on for ch x,y,z and $). If you select LAYER (Simplest) then you will send on all of those midi channels. You can press the buttons under the sliders (each mapped to the uppers and lower zones), to turn on/off that midi out. Example: is x,y,z and $ are 1, 2, 3 and 4 and you are set to Layer and all the LEDs above the zone buttons are on then you will send to all of 1,2,3,4. If you press the 3rd zone button then you turn off the send to ch 3. If you select Split, then you can specify the split point of the upper1,2 and lower1,2 zones. so if all the sones are active (LEDSs on) and the split is at C4, then you will send on 1 and 2 on the lower and 3 and 4 on the upper. (Note: the midi channels can be set to control the internal performances patches or external midi devices. I use ch1-5 for the D70 patches, 6 is minimoog, 7 is prophet 5, 8 is MKS30, 9 is M1000, 10-14 is TX16W, 15 is XR 10, and 16 is D70 rhythm). Finally, if you slect Zone, you ca specify independent zones for uper 1, upper2, loer 1 and lower 2. You may have zone overlaps. The way you specify the zones is great: if you press the ZONE or SPLIT button twice you get a graphic diaply shwing the keyboard and the zones as lines above the keyboard. By pressing and holding the sone button below the slider and pressing the upper and lower keyboard key you can specify the length and psotion fo the zone and immediately see a graphical rep of the zones. If a zone is deselected you will see it as a dashed line. An active zone is solid. very fast. Finally, you can specify if the two voices in UPPER or LOWER will be layed (norm), vel switched (SW and approriate vel threshold) or mixed (MIX and threshold). You can also use the LEVEL and TRANSPOSE buttons with the four sliders to set volumes and pitch transposes for the MIDI output even for external devices. Sorry about the typos... I am feeling lazy. ciao, Brett L Maraldo Plexus Productions From: nick@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) Subject: Captain Waldorf goes to Super LA [LONG] Date: 14 Oct 91 12:23:43 GMT HEY I JUST GOT A REAL NICE BOARD!!! A rOLAND d-70 IT HAS SOME GREAT SOUNDS AN YWAY I PAID 1000 QUID!! IS THIS ThE GOING RATE OR WAS I RIPED OFF LET ME KNOW ANYWAY ALSO hAS ANYBODY GOT sOME PATCHES FOR THIs KBD PLEAS EMAIL THEM TO ME THANKS!!!! Parody aside, this has been a good weekend hardware-wise, I think. I was walking past Scayles Music last week and... ...hmm? Oh yeah, let me tell you about Scayles. They used to deal in 2nd-hand fishing tackle and musical instruments ("Scales." get it?), before dumping the fishing tackle and concentrating on musical instruments. So, there's this shoebox-sized shop full of guitar amps, drums, accordions, and old keyboards. You remember the Jawas from Star Wars, with all the old battered 'droids being sold and haggled over? Scayles is the same for musical instruments, right down to the portable Yamaha keyboard suspended upside-down and having its feet burned. [I know. That wasn't the Jawas. That's not important right now.] I tend not to pay much attention to Scayles. They make a living from 2nd-hand gear, which means they pay peanuts for items they take and ramp the prices when selling (I mean, $500 for a used TX81Z?). I tend to shift old gear by trading in against cut-price new gear, or if I'm not in a hurry I'll sell privately for a better price. But, I look into Scayles' window a couple of times a month, just in case something interesting turns up. Recently they had a Sequential Drumtrax and Oberheim Prommer being sold as a matching pair [Huh?], a healthy-looking MicroMoog ("Look Mummy, a ribbon controller..."), a JX3P, Poly 61, DW8000 (I would definitely have made them an offer on a rack of same), an old Mirage, and a D-70. Huh? [Double-take.] Oh. A D-70. The Mega Roland Flagship, sitting in Scayles on top of a couple of amps and a bongo set, just behind the violin and accordions, and looking like yer average cute home-loving labrador caged up in a dogs' home. Hmm, how much do they want for it? Thousand quid, huh? Shame I don't have 1000 quid, otherwise I'd be tempted, besides I've got too many keyboard units already and.... [FX: Lightbulb] OK, so I'm back at Scayles at the crack of dawn and seeing if they'll give me the D-70 in exchange for the D-50 and pf85. They weren't that keen after doing the sums, and were after another 200 quid, but we agreed on an extra 100 and that was that. I should explain that the D-70 lists for something like L1895 (approaching $3500), with a street price of around L1600, so I was surprised that Scayles had one for L999. My only conclusion was that the owner had fallen on hard times and was wanting to free up some cash quickly. Shame really (for him, that is) since the machine was in practically mint condition apart from some scratches to the underside - even the perspex windshield covering the display was fine - so he could have gotten L1400 or so privately, I reckon. I would guess Scayles gave him around L800 for it, which I reckoned translated into a very reasonable deal for the buyer. (Me.) Anyway, I walked off with the manual for a couple of days (a procedure I recommend for all purchases, btw) and came back to give the machine a quick medical in the store with a torch and the Lexicon MRC to check all the sliders, pots, keys, buttons and rear connectors. Seemed fine. Checked the display for dropped pixels. Seemed fine. So I'm off home with it over my shoulder. (Together with a drummers' stool. Here's me, been searching for a decent solid adjustable keyboard stool for *years*, not been able to find one anywhere, and then realising that what I was after was a drummers' stool all along. Shame I had to buy a drum key for it as well...) So, I've had this machine at home a day (the D-70, not the drummers' stool), and I'm slowly finding my way around the user interface. I thought I'd give you my first impressions. PHYSICALLY: very nice. The 76-note keyboard is a *big* point in its favour. (I was after a partial replacement for the pf85, after all, and 5 octaves isn't really enough for a controller.) It's not very deep (front-to-back) so I'll have to get some longer Apex arms to bring it out so I can see the display when I'm using it live below the Wavestation. The D-70 has a very small cross-section, and looks a little strange alongside a Wavestation. The controllers feel much nicer than the D-50 - less spongy. The keyboard is better (but, it could not have been worse), and passable for piano solos (I couldn't possibly play a piano part on the D-50). The front panel buttons are so-so. Most are fine, but the function keys are shallow travel, creak a little, and feel a little flimsy. I have a phobia about broken microswitches after having a Mac mouse die on me and a fault develop in my replacement trackball, so I have a feeling I might get a failure here sometime. SOUND: Sounds like $1,000,000. Well, sounds like $3500 which is what it lists for. Well, sounds like a D-50 but with a *lot* more punch and clarity, a smoother and more blended sound (since it's applying multimode filtering to the sample data rather than layering synth and unfiltered sample partials), a superb bottom end compared to the D-50, with the choir and bell samples transposing down well to the bottom of its 76-note board (I don't know yet whether it challenges the VFX as digital-synth-with-the-biggest-bottom until I get into programming it) - I can make sounds like on T. Dream's LEGEND soundtrack. The high-end is different to the D-50, mainly because it's using highpass resonant filtering for animation rather than lots of LFO mod. This is really where the D-50 and D-70 diverge in terms of capabilities. The '70 seems to have more warmth and character than the WS, and out-basses it as far as I can tell. VOICE ARCHITECTURE: Quite respectable. Less LFO modulation than the D-50, simpler envelopes, no synth features like PWM. No ring-mod (Differential Phase Thingummy instead). But, of course, the thing which sold me on it when I heard it last year is the filtering. It's mistakable for analog resonant filtering unless you listen closely. How closely is a matter I have to investigate. Doing multimode resonant filtering on sample data is sweet. Very very sweet. I like it a lot. It suits the way I work, which involves putting sound elements into specific parts of the frequency spectrum. I enjoyed this on the VFX, and find it's lack to be my single biggest cause of frustration with the WS. Oh, the D-70's filter resonance can be overdriven in an interesting way, I notice. Here's where the D-70 has its only serious weakness. It only has 30 voices. Without more LFO modulation facilities, I'll probably be wanting to do more layering of tones to add animation, and I'll be running out of voices pretty quickly, especially with multi-channel input. How much of a problem this is, remains to be seen. PERFORMANCE HEIRARCHY: Despite KEYBOARD's slamming, I find this to be rather good. The Tone Pallette sliders make incremental changes at the patch level (I think) to already-programmed tones, so that sounds can be modified in most major respects very quickly. (The LFO's aren't here, which is a bit of a shame - they're lower down.) All four tones are available for these changes, with graphical feedback, in parallel. This is very nice. KEYBOARD slammed the machine for not having cross-referencing tools for the tones. In fact, the Wavestation has the same problem, but has a clearer user interface for seeing what's where, which is why it's not a problem so much on the WS. The multitimbral operation looks fairly sensible, although the user interface for walking around the MIDI parameters is hellish at times. I'll investigate this further, but so far all I've done with it MIDI-wise is checked controller transmission and SysEx'ed off all the internal memory. Hey, the word 'SysEx' verbs quite well. USER INTERFACE: A combination of superb and frustrating. The performance-level stuff (Tone Pallette, dedicated editing buttons) is superb, making sound design and modification quick, intuitive, painless, etc. Getting around the lower levels of the interface heirarchy is like having teeth pulled. It's not possible to jump around between tones as you'd like. Some parameters appear in several pages. Some pages appear more than once on separate programmer buttons, with different page titles (Gnnnh!). So, it'll take some getting used to. Like I say, a nice performance interface with some sh*tty interfacing below ground level... The manual is fair. Nothing more. But then, it would have to be a very good manual to explain how the user interface heirarchy works - and it doesn't explain this very well at all. It took me a few hours and several cups of tea to figure it out; the most helpful part of the manual was the SysEx memory maps in the appendix. MIDI CONTROL: Surprisingly good, given Roland's usual reputation here. The standard controllers can all be remapped at the performance (or is it patch?) level for the incoming reception parts. In addition, a performance has a transmission MIDI pallette which maps all the outgoing controllers. Zones can be layered for MIDI (although local patches can't be layered in ways you might expect) and send volume and patch changes. Notes aren't held under performance changes, which is a shame but not surprising. Oh: solo and portamento are supported, and the D-70 has *fingered portamento without retriggering*! Hooray, the feature that until now only Yamaha keyboards have gotten right. Now I have no excuse to buy a TX81Z. (But, who needs an excuse?) SOFTWARE: Yes. It's true. The LFO's slow down when you play chords. I have to tell you, there's nothing more discouraging than powering up a $3500 synthesiser and having it announce "Software Version 1.00" at you. But then, I've been burned by Ensoniq. So, there's the LFO performance problem and a couple of the interface shortcuts seem not to work. According to Roland UK, I can just install the 1.17 ROMs into it; there's some confusion about whether there's a faster CPU upgrade as well. Roland tell me that I can just put 1.17 into this machine without a fast CPU, but wouldn't deny the existence of a fast CPU upgrade. I'll take the machine to 1.17 and see how well it performs. If it's too sluggish, I'll call Roland again and see what a new CPU will cost me. FACTORY PATCHES: Usual assortment of Roland Rubbish with silly names. The previous owner had made an attempt at programming with about half a dozen patches called PIANO, CHOIR, SYNTH but otherwise the factory patches were intact. The worst thing is the bl**dy demo sequence. I don't want bl**dy Eric Persing playing sappy New Age fusion music on my synthesiser. I object to the legend "PCM Play" being inscribed on the front panel and the potted biography of Mr. Persing, one of L.A.'s hottest session players with TV commercials to his name. I mean, well, *yawn*. STUPIDITIES: The D-70 doesn't have an IEC/Euro connector on the back. The mains cable is grommetted directly into the case. STOOPID for a live keyboard. This will be coming off in exchange for an IEC as soon as I can find my wire cutters... -- Nick Rothwell | "That's the Waldorf MicroWave set for General MIDI." LFCS | "EEEEEIIIIAAAAAOOOOOOUUUUMMMM ZUMZUPZUMZUPZUMZUP..." Edinburgh University | "Is that `STRINGS 1'?" nick@dcs.ed.ac.uk | "Yeah. You got a problem with that?" From: cassiel@cix.compulink.co.uk (Nick Rothwell) Subject: Roland D-70: Let The Truth Be Date: 9 Nov 91 17:52:36 GMT I bet you thought the D-70 was a Super LA synth, didn't you? Replacement flagship to take over from the D-50 and all that. Wrong-o. It so happens that I had the hood up on my D-70 to upgrade the ROMs, and I noticed something interesting. On all the important boards (main digital, analog subboard, PSU) there's the usual printing of the Roland logo and so on, but the D-70 legend is stuck on. Hmm, thought I, and peeled off one of the labels. Wanna guess what it says underneath? "U-50." So, the much-vaunted mega Linear Arithmetic synth is no such thing. It's not the top of the LA range, it's the top of the PCM sample player range. Roland obviously decided at the last moment that marketing a new "synthesiser" in the D-50 line was a better idea than another sample player, so the name was changed everywhere (well, apart from the id on the main chassis, which they missed). This is no great surprise to some of us. I always thought the D-70 was a glorified U-series machine. Brett Maraldo agrees. It has the same sort-of profile as the U-20, and even comes boxes with the same end cheeks. But I never realised that it came so close to being the Roland U-50. Now, I hope you'll excuse me as I slope off and hide my head in shame at being, after all my efforts, the owner of Yet Another Sample Playback Board... Nick. From: u894825@bruny.cc.utas.edu.au (Jon Elliott) Subject: Re: Roland D-70: Let The Truth Be Date: 10 Nov 91 03:07:27 GMT The sound of the D-70 was the first thing that struck me when I had a play with one. Not the warm (will I get flamed to ashes for calling a digital synth "warm"?), clear sound of the D-50 and not the crystalline, thin sound of the D-5/10/20/110 (although it's *much* nicer than the latter) but a pleasant (if slightly dull) sound that reminded me of an M1's pads with a little more grunt. The acoustic instruments were about as true as the U-20's. In fact, don't they sound rather like the...? Oh, yeah. There was that (finishes aside). The D-70 takes U series sample cards. Surely that would have caused some suspicions? One might also have noted the lack of pulse width modulation, attack transients (as I recall, all of the D-70's "tones" are single cycle waves or complete samples) and most of the EQ was another sign that all was not as it seemed. It must, of course, be noted that memory is a lot cheaper than it was in the heady days when the D-50 was released. The main reason for the existence of L/A synthesis (Roland's version thereof, anyway) was that the cost of memory required for the storage of complete samples was prohibitive. Without the cost factor we see complete samples being included. What about the filters? I've heard it rumoured that they're quite good. One might be forgiven for thinking that Roland looked at the U-20, gave it some filters, did some jiggery-pokery with the LFOs (are there two on the D-70?) and released the beast. Roland might be losing its technical edge but the D-70's still (in my most humble opinion) one of the nicest sounding boxes out there. I'm not sure how useful DLM and "analog feel" are as synthesis tools but I think that the prescence of the former might just allow the D-70 to be called "synthesizer", even if the synthesis method isn't really L/A. Jon. ================================================================================ Jonathan Elliott | Sole and founding member, AMALGM - University of Tasmania | Analog Maniacs Against Lamentable u894825@bruny.cc.utas.edu.au | General MIDI - Join today! ================================================================================