"People tend to bash Roland here because it is an excuse for their poor career choice. (and you don't get much negative reaction bashing Roland on a Korg forum.) Personally I blame Korg, because I have more Korg equipment! HA HA.
Maybe it's because Roland users are a cut above, and expect more. "
Let me focus on the last sentence, it came right into my mind one hour ago, while I was programming a live setup for my gig tomorrow.
For a song I have to play I selected a synth type sound. It's actually a patch on PRST: 1178, called R-Trance.
Its what I exactly need, and the delay you hear adds a nice dimension to the sound.
No, I copied the sound over into my live setup where I need it among other sounds.
On of the benefit from the effect structure on the FG should be that the patch sounds exactly like it does in the Single Mode. Well, more or less, taking into account the small variations coming from the send effects.
I realized that the Delay effect is suddenly missing when I copy the patch into my live setup. I looked at the PFX for that particular patch, and it is shut off. It's a 4 tap delay, but not active. I looked further on the chorus send effect, where some patches use a delay instead of a chorus. It was neither there.
Then I finally found, that the delay effect on the patch R-Trance is coming from the send reverb effect, which is set to a delay sound.
This is what is driving me crazy sometimes with this keyboard. It's where I ask myself, how stupid can a sound designer be, to select the reverb send effect for a delay!
If you copy that patch to a live setup and copy manually (we all know that Roland exclusively megafeature) its reverb send effect (acting as a delay!), all other patches will have delay. There is no possibility to apply a classic reverb/hall sound to the other patches because the reverb send effect is used for a delay.
Instead, the sound programmer could have used the PFX which he deactivated for that patch, and program the delay in the PFX. There he has dozens of different delays, but no, he select the reverb send part of the effect structure and creates the delay there, thus making it impossible to use reverb on other parts of the live setup.
I'm still thinking about it, how dumb one can be, to apply effects in that way.
I had to recreate the delay part on the pfx by myself, waste another user single memory location and spend my time on useless tasks.
The development team at Roland should have a meeting with their sound designers and clarify some principles about how and where to use the effects. I would gave the sounddesigners the instruction not to use the reverb send effect for delays, if the pfx is free or not used.
There are dozens of such patches where the effects are programmed with a extraordinarily high level of stupidity. Sorry, but there are no better words to name it.
So, my point is, we don't expect necessarily more, but we expect at least some fundamental things to be considered before a keyboard is released. My single user memory is vastly occupied by patches where I have to repair the effect structure, created by some high drugged sound designers, who don't think half a step forward, what kind of problems it will create for the users...
