This post is only about two and a quarter years late!
I had for a few years worked “in the box” when it came to working on music at home, when “in the box” usually meant a sound card, and I’d been using Yamaha XG products.
Whilst good there was a huge range of sounds I wished I had access to…
Roland D-50
It was a long time after the D-50’s seeming co-reign on the UK music scene (shared with Yamaha’s DX7) and in my mind that meant I could only look to see if there was anything that could do similar sounds, not wanting to delve into the world of second hand equipment. That philosophy has somewhat changed in more recent years but in the 2000s I was all about having things from new.
Somehow a search lead to Roland’s VC-1, first in what was probably intended as a wide range of “synth brains” that could be installed into one of two compatible Roland products, the V-Synth keyboard and VariOS sound module.
What really caught my attention that a review (I think) of a rack mount instrument that could just as easily be used on a desk…
The V-Synth XT was said to be able play all the D-50 sounds because it had the VC-1 and VC-2 “cards” built-in. I’ve never dared see if there are actual cards inside or just the electronics/software built into the board(s) of the V-Synth XT (I suspect the latter). Based on reviews the VC-1 was said to be identical in sound to a D-50 even down to viewing the audio outputs on an oscilloscope and observing certain “strange” features of the D-50 digital oscillators.
At the time I was strongly against buying second hand so bought one of these, thinking how much fun I would have. I would never have dreamed I would use it the way I did.
The V-Synth XT is an impressive looking device with a large (for the time) touch screen interface and a range of knobs and buttons. The default V-Synth mode carried most of the features of the original V-Synth keyboard synth but at the touch of a button and a selection on the touch screen you can access one of two alternate modes.
The VC-1 mode was like turning the unit into a Roland D-50 (more accurately a D-550 rack version of the D-50) with the same added bells and whistles as a “real” VC-1 card. The VC-2 mode effectively turned the unit into a vocal processing unit, including classic VP-330 style vocoding. Really I’ve only briefly played with the VC-2 mode and not found it very compelling for anything I want.
When running the VC-1 mode (conveniently booting much faster than the V-Synth mode) the big advantage over the D-50 is the range of memory. Six sets of ROM memory, including all the original factory presets and the four patch cards that Roland released for the D-50. On top of that (and the bank of “new” presets) there are a total of 8 “user” banks, giving 512 patch memories for your own sounds, and because the VC-1 emulation was so accurate you could send D-50 SYSEX files and the VC-1 would end up with new sounds loaded to the first user memory bank.
I personally loaded up a range of banks, paying particular interest to any banks mentioning Jean-Michel Jarre who used the D-50 heavily on the Revolutions album and only slightly less so on the Calypso tracks on Waiting for Cousteau. All you have to do is copy the first user bank to one of the other seven banks using the touchscreen UI every time you send a SYSEX bank to the unit.
The native V-Synth mode is fantastically powerful, and I never quite got around to properly exploiting it anywhere near the full potential. The sound engine looks at first glance fairly simple, two oscillators which could be simple waveforms or PCM samples, and with their own pitch and amplitude envelopes etc, and their own LFO, a modulator for FM or Ring modulation effects among others, two “COSM” effect engines to operate on the resulting sound which could be as simple as a filter or as advanced as an amplifier or speaker emulator (each effect with it’s own LFO), an overall amplitude control the envelope and LFO, then a general effects engine with a multi-fx slot, chorus slot and reverb slot. Already it is obvious you’re not short on LFOs. Then comes the mind-blowing discovery. A patch can have up to 16 “zones”. Sure let’s split the keyboard into 16 section within a single patch! Sadly zone configuration only has a “top note” value so no layering of zones, thus the zones will run for zone 1 at the low end and up to max zone 16 at the high end.
You can totally overwrite the factory sounds (512 patches) and sample memory (max 999 samples or 50 MB,, whichever limit you hit first), nothing is sacred, but what you can also do if you want is to have multiple “projects” using the “PC card” (Type-II) slot on the front panel. Unfamiliar with this format? PC card was the new name for PCMCIA card, usually used on laptops in the 1990s. Already slowly becoming obsolete by mid 2000s these are increasingly rare, but what I found works is a SanDisk CompactFlash adapter into which I’ve inserted a 128 MB SanDisk CompactFlash memory card. CompactFlash cards are also rarer to find having been displaced by MMC then SD memory cards.
I was once inspired to start on producing a cover of Rob Hubbard’s music from the Commodore 64 version of the Thrust game. I had previously produced an Amiga MOD version (not sure if I have it anymore) so was familiar with the track, and thought about multi-track recording various parts from the V-Synth, including a particularly “dirty” sounding drum loop from the presets and a COSM driven overdriven electric guitar lead sound creating a slower “industrial” feeling cover. I did a test (posted here two years ago) but didn’t get around to doing a complete track. Mostly because the music side of my life took an odd turn.
In mid 2010 I was invited to join in a weekly jamming night at a local pub, after doing a few minutes jamming with a drummer and “lead” guitar player when the normal organiser and acoustic rhythm guitar player didn’t show up one week, another person having turned up with their electric guitar and promptly disappeared. I could just about get 12-bar blues in one key out of a guitar and in meant the other guys didn’t get bored with nothing to do. My problem was I didn’t have anything suitable to take out at the time, so I got inventive and placed a bunch of online orders,
The next jamming evening I took a brand new “X” stand, my Evolution MK-361C controller keyboard, a new USB power bank to power the keyboard (previously hooked to a computer), a sustain pedal, my V-Synth XT MIDI connected to the keyboard, and a newly purchased small Peavy KB-1 keyboard amplifier.
I picked a few favourite presets from the VC-1/D-50 mode before removing it from my small 10U desktop rack (then containing little more than a 1U line mixer, a hi-fi amplifier on a tray and the V-Synth XT) and setting out to join in my first “public” appearance as a keyboard player since 1987 at school. I loved the reactions from the guy organising the jamming evening as he kept looking back towards me (I was set up behind him) and smiling.
After a couple of months enjoying the experience and missing a “real piano” sound I added a “laptop stand” add-on to the X stand and a desktop style Roland sound module, but that’s another story.
Maybe I should revisit that Thrust cover idea one day, but with cleaner recordings from the V-Synth XT, using the digital outputs perhaps, or maybe just decent quality cables going directly into a decent audio interface. I just need to “exercise” the data entry and parameter knobs a bit to make sure the thing stays in control and verify I have MIDI and audio connections – it has the dubious honour of being the only sound module to have been “permanently” hooked to the mains since I bought it.
Sadly since my last order with the supplier their brand has been taken over and my order history is no longer available to me, though I do have at least partial email history from 2009. This has happened to two suppliers I’ve used in the past now (one brand has even “vanished” leaving only the “parent” company) and I no longer use either of them. I think I got the V-Synth XT somewhere in the 2005 to 2007 timeframe as I don’t think the V-Synth GT was out at the time.
What would I be able to replace this with if it were to fail? Well at the time of writing Roland have not only released the “boutique” form factor D-05 module, but they have a software version of the D-50 via their Roland Cloud service. That sorts out the VC-1 angle. Roland’s own VT-4 does more than enough vocal processing for me and vocoders are easy to come by. Replacing the native V-Synth mode however would be a bigger issue. Judging from what I’ve read online there isn’t much out there that has quite the same range of options. Potentially a new sound module called Pipes currently being developed after a successful Kickstarter (expected early 2020) might give some of the functionality, and by feeding it the V-Synth sample library (if you can get them out… not actually tried) you might just be able to imitate some of the sound design with pre-trigger “tweakers” and post-trigger “effects”, hopefully with an evolving range of these processing options.