The Roland V-Synth: Why so underappreciated?

[BBFG#]

Personally, I love my V. It plays like an instrument in a time where most play more like computers. Its Elastic Synthesis is the only thing I've seen from Roland that has been able to rectify their sampling philosophy of compress and truncate. And let's not forget its VP capabilities.

But if other players have no taste for it, it doesn't matter, becasue there is plenty of love from those that do and our listeners.

I belong to a couple of V groups where it is realized for the beast it is, (Although many of us want a next stage in evolution in it). And my biggest concern at the moment is Roland announcing they have no intention of making Windows 8/8.1 drivers for it. Even after they've been selling their warehouse stock off for the last year at premium prices. Hopefully, it won't effect much more than the editor?

I thought they stopped making drivers at XP? Couldn't find any for my Win 7 system or OS-X Intel

I guess I never noticed, Windows loads adequate drivers for just about everything now and where they come up lacking is in any software that the keyboard uses. Now that you mention it. the laptop I use for its editor/librarian is XP. I see it's time to do some testing on another a newer system for me.

[aMUSEd]

Yeah it doesn't matter too much as I use the midi outs anyway - it only affects people who want to use it as a USB midi device. Just a pity they didn't make that class compliant so I could use it with my iPad. At least they did do that (which helps futureproof it) for USB access to the internal drive (plus card drives) so any system just mounts them as an external hard drive.

[xalama qo]

It's amazing at what it does, but what it does is not everyone's 'cup of tea'.

I remember a very hip-hop-pop black-eyed-peas producer promo vid back in the early days. Was touted as a one-stop-shop for production... and it could very well be.

Personally, I love its solidness and the keybed action, but hate the clunk on releasing the keys. TT Pad is cool, if somewhat gimmicky. D-beam is just pure gimmick, although quite effectively usable. Takes a few minutes to boot up. Ugly gray plastic aerofoil thingy around the touch screen actually gets in the way of some button presses up at the top. Ugly gray aerofoil end-pieces, although the Jupiter 8 influence is clear, they shoulda stuck to simple aluminium plate end pieces. No CC's sent from knobby interface. D'oh!

It's very distinctive granular synth engine is instantly recognizable as a V-Synth, it just always sounds like a V-Synth. SERIOUS sub bass, check out preset Physical Bass iirc. Best vocal pitcher/formant-er in hardware (possibly).

I have a love/hate relationship with mine. Roland abandoned me at v2, and I've never bought (new)Roland since (even the fact that Sonar is now un-Rolanded makes me smile... I feel sorry for the poor dudes who went all-in and bought the mixer console interface too. Ouch.)

One thing I haven't done yet and should try someday is using single-cycle waveforms as oscillators. You could load a truckload into RAM and probably get some very interesting sounds with the TT Pad and everything else on offer.

Great concept, meh implementation, epic fail support.
Apparently Howard Scarr is quite a fan, and there are plenty of HS patches for it.

IMO, it needs a really good computer based editor to dive into the depths and get the best from it.(Someone please make one). Or you could just resign yourself to being a hunchback with the onset of old age and spend hours programming it from the touch screen.

[BBFG#]

I have a GT, so some of the aesthetics there have been improved. VP-vocoder is really a great function in it. More useable than robot vocoders. Never liked Roland keybeds, but I can live with it and since it never leaves the studio, it should last longer than most. There are many soundbanks available free for the download and I've even snagged a few waves from other users that are of great use in the APSynthesis. Along those lines, the legato triggers are the most intuitive of any keyboard I've had. In fact, that is the single greatest factor in not giving up on it. And btw, it layers very nicely with Zebra and Camel too. Very deep in my estimation for the things it does that others do not.

My GAS hits a little around this machine though, and things that lurk in the back of my mind for it is considering getting another before they all disappear and buying extra keybeds since that is where Rolands have always failed me.

[xalama qo]

TBH, I prefer the look of the 1st version. GT is just too colourful for my tastes, although I'd enjoy the extra juice under the hood!
But then I've always used the V sparsely, and I've never found the 24 voice poly to be a limitation. So it's my only 'new' vintage. All my other hardware synths have been 2nd hand buys.

[Electronicaz]

Greetings from the future! I've just bought my 2nd v-synth in 2 years, sadly the first had so many faulty buttons I returned it. Finally nabbed a nice one again and I'm loving it. There doesn't seem to be anything you can't do with it. I've been going through hundreds of banks of presets and editing presets to my taste as well as diving in and creating my own from scratch with samples and the built in waves. Amazing synth. I've got a lot of other gear both new and old and there's difinitely a place for the v synth even today.

[Jace-BeOS]

I’ve had trouble getting the Vari-pitch/time control encoding to work with my own samples. Anyone had success with that?

[Electronicaz]

Have you worked out which of the 4 encoding options is best yet? . I was reading the manual about this just last night. It's a bit confusing and I need to experiment with it properly. I've only ever used solo and I liked the outcome. I even used a single sample of my sh101 about c4 and have made an amazing poly synth pad from just that one sample.

[Jace-BeOS]

I don’t really understand what the manual is trying to convey about the different encoding types and I have found that the ones that give the least artifacts on playback are the two that offer the least vari-phrase features.

[justin3am]

I always used Backing for drum samples and Solo for voice or anything else. If I remember right, formant only works with Solo and only when Robot Voice is not enabled (?, I may have that backwards).

[justin3am]

Is it possible that you are not loading the encoded version of the sample? I don't remember if that is possible but if it is, that might explain why the vari-phrase functions aren't doing anything. It's been more than a year since the last time I used a V-Synth, so my memory is fuzzy.

[Jace-BeOS]

I’m being sure to encode and save the samples, and use the encoded versions (saved right over the originals). What’s happening is that they play glitchy when vari features are enabled. I’ve had a few samples come out working okay, but not most of them.

[justin3am]

Weird, I only ever used my own samples. I do remember having issues with encoding occasionally but it was usually due to something I did wrong. Are you using rhythmic samples? If so, are you placing slices in the samples in front of the transients? Are the samples complex (like a layered sound)?

[Jace-BeOS]

Actually no, I’ve not used rhythmic samples yet. Just various other sounds. Some instruments I’ve sampled (like a violin), various other bits and bobs...

I didn’t think the sounds were particularly complex. The one sound I thought was complex actually worked well in ensemble mode (is that what that encoding is called?).

[justin3am]

Yeah, ensemble mode is good for samples which have a lot going on (like chords or multiple overlapping instruments). If you aren't using rhythmic samples, try turning the 'Depth' down before encoding. If you have slices in audio where there is not a transient, it will still treat the slice, as if there is a transient.