Roland BK-9: a partial alternative to the Integra?

Well that's completely thrown me specialplant..

I had totally made my mind up to buy an integra 7 in the summer as I want the supernatural sounds, and all the other really cool things it has on board. Including the "motional surround" which at first I thought was gimmicky, but having listened to user creations on links from clan forums and youtube I am absolutely knocked out by the way its being used. To my ear you actually get a sense of space and distance of individual instruments..
However I already have a Roland e80 arranger keyboard which has, A good soundset from various boards including vdrums, a nice to play and good feel keyboard, on board sequencer, really nice and easy to use vocal processor with 4 part harmony, and all the effects I could want. Plus it works great with any software D.A.W I've happened to use. But listening to the BK-9 from your link has got me tempted to find out more about it. Listening to the demo's i'm hearing sounds from my e80 as well as new tones mixed in. I cant see it mentioned anywhere if the bk-9 uses the supernatural drum sounds? Which would be a dealbreaker with me as they are the best drum tones I've heard anywhere and on anything, but as you say, Roland say that there will be future sound expansions which can be loaded into a user RAM.
Now if I could get my e80 to work perfectly as a controller with the i7, including using all the parameter sliders and function buttons to control the i7 its a no brainer and its an i7 for me. It just seems to be a pity to waste the e80 which is a good board that has served me well and earned me cash.However you've given me pause for thought thank you. Any input or ideas from anyone else would be welcome..

markoffski wrote:

Well that's completely thrown me specialplant..

I had totally made my mind up to buy an integra 7 in the summer as I want the supernatural sounds, and all the other really cool things it has on board. Including the "motional surround" which at first I thought was gimmicky, but having listened to user creations on links from clan forums and youtube I am absolutely knocked out by the way its being used. To my ear you actually get a sense of space and distance of individual instruments..
However I already have a Roland e80 arranger keyboard which has, A good soundset from various boards including vdrums, a nice to play and good feel keyboard, on board sequencer, really nice and easy to use vocal processor with 4 part harmony, and all the effects I could want. Plus it works great with any software D.A.W I've happened to use. But listening to the BK-9 from your link has got me tempted to find out more about it. Listening to the demo's i'm hearing sounds from my e80 as well as new tones mixed in. I cant see it mentioned anywhere if the bk-9 uses the supernatural drum sounds? Which would be a dealbreaker with me as they are the best drum tones I've heard anywhere and on anything, but as you say, Roland say that there will be future sound expansions which can be loaded into a user RAM.
Now if I could get my e80 to work perfectly as a controller with the i7, including using all the parameter sliders and function buttons to control the i7 its a no brainer and its an i7 for me. It just seems to be a pity to waste the e80 which is a good board that has served me well and earned me cash.However you've given me pause for thought thank you. Any input or ideas from anyone else would be welcome..

Excuse me, but if you use your e80 as a Controller for the integra-7, you are not wasting the e80, but enlarging it with the i-7 sounds.
You can (and should) merge the sounds of both together, for example by connecting the e80 outs to the EXT INPUT of the Integra-7, and this way you can even apply the Motion Surround to the External Part.

At the moment I'm not aware about the MIDI controller functions on the e80, as I've never took the time to read the Manual :-), but I'm almost sure they are there.


EDITED: I've read the e80's manual and it is a MONSTER !!!

MIDI TX
CHANNEL (1~16)
Allows you to assign a MIDI transmit channel to the selected part. Unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, we suggest using the same TX and RX channel numbers for a part.

LOCAL
This is where you can disconnect the part from the internal sound source (“OFF”) – or re-establish that connection (“ON”). You can also change the LOCAL setting of all parts simultaneously using MODE [Local=On]/[Local=Off] on the first MIDI page.

Your saying what i'm thinking Paulo..

The i7 is just too good a package too miss, and the combo of that and my e80 is all i need. I am impressed with the bk-9 it sounds great, but the quality of the sounds just dont blow me away like some of the user pieces and demo's i've heard of the i7, and i dont know if its just the quality of the mixing on the demos for the bk-9, the the drums dont sound like the supernatural drum sounds that have so impressed me on the i7. I am most impressed with the idea of future rom sound expansion thats the way forward, i'm sick of changing keyboards to get new tech and this e80 is a really cool board. Thanks for the input friend.

markoffski wrote:

Your saying what i'm thinking Paulo..

The i7 is just too good a package too miss, and the combo of that and my e80 is all i need. I am impressed with the bk-9 it sounds great, but the quality of the sounds just dont blow me away like some of the user pieces and demo's i've heard of the i7, and i dont know if its just the quality of the mixing on the demos for the bk-9, the the drums dont sound like the supernatural drum sounds that have so impressed me on the i7. I am most impressed with the idea of future rom sound expansion thats the way forward, i'm sick of changing keyboards to get new tech and this e80 is a really cool board. Thanks for the input friend.

Besides that the e80 has plenty of options regarding MIDI control and the number of channels that it can drive simultaneously, taking the number of keyboard split combinations possible on board.

Anyway, the BK-9 will definitely not be able to replace the Integra, but it may have its 'most important' sounds whatever this means for the individual user. It could also be a bluff package - I am waiting for the manual and tone list to be published. Maybe Roland really took the additional 500 sounds from the SRX library, but maybe they took most of the sounds from former instruments like the SonicCell, then it would be a lot less interesting. And the future sound expansions will probably remain a totally vague issue for a long time...

The BK-9 manual and tone list are online now!

http://lib.roland.co.jp/support/en/manuals/res/63051374/BK-9Tone&DrumKitList_e2_W.pdf

I'm going to compare it to the BK7m and GW8-L/E World section tone lists. I think the BK-9 tones are mostly a combination of the BK7m and GW8 World tones.

I don't quite see how this could get someone thinking about an Integra to choose it. If you've already got a controller, don't need the rhythms, and are looking primarily for maximum number of new sounds the Integra-7 is the choice. If sound selection and having a keyboard is more important, than this may be a choice.

Frankly, I wasn't overwhelmed by most of the demos other than the "50s/60s" and trumpet/guitar demos. Most of these sounded like your typical "boom chucka" arranger demos, very artificial and techno sounding.

If a perfect selection of 500 sounds had been taken from SRX boards, it could have been a good small-scale alternative to the Integra for some users, particularly if there are good expansions in future. However, as far as I can assess the tone list right now, there are not so many sounds from SRX boards, e.g. no excellent strings from SRX04 and not the best brass sections from SRX10, which I had hoped for. So I agree, just a combination of BK-7m and GW8 sounds alone with 22 acoustic SN sounds (instead of over 200 in the Integra) would be no alternative to the Integra.

I agree with both of you guys "and paulo!"..

I too was underwhelmed by the bk-9 demo's, although still think it is a good keyboard price and
feature wise, the sounds just dont blow me away like the integra 7 sounds. I dont know if you agree but the bk-9 kits dont sound like supernatural kits?, although they are better in tone than the v-drums on my e-80.
Now i know i can use my e-80 as a complete controller for the i7, "thanks to paulo" i intend to do so for all the reasons i stated earlier in this post.
I will buy an i7 in late summer as i dont earn my living from music anymore so theres no real rush, and by which time "maybe?" Roland will have got their act together and produced a nice editor for PC/Android.
For all those of us who dont want to put all our eggs in the apple/mac basket, "i have before and they got broken!".
But i dont worry if they dont because Smart Guys are around like K_Take and others who will do it anyway..

After studying the BK-9 tone list in detail and comparing it to some SRX patch lists, the BK-7m tone list and the GW8-L and -E World tone lists, I found that my first assessment was wrong: Only about 35 tones are clearly taken from the GW8-L World sounds (and these in turn are taken from the expansion boards SRX 09, 07, 03 and 10). At least 35 sounds are taken from the Sonic Cell (they have an SC in their names). A few sounds are taken from the GW8-E World and at the same time from the old RS synthesizers (they have and RS in their name).

Unfortunately, I could only find very few tones whose names correspond to patches from SRX boards - even fewer tones than the GW8-L has from SRX boards. I'm not sure whether no more samples were taken from the SRX library or whether the samples were reprogrammed and the names were changed. But I assume most additional sounds are taken from instruments such as SonicCell, SD-50 or Juno Gi (I haven't checked their tone lists, it's just too much...). So for now, I am NOT hopeful that the BK-9 sound library could replace an important portion of the SRX library, which is part of the Integra.

I suspect Roland wants to make money from its SRX library once again by selling the SRX boards in the new form of BK-9 expansion downloads in the future.

specialplant wrote:

...

I suspect Roland wants to make money from its SRX library once again by selling the SRX boards in the new form of BK-9 expansion downloads in the future.

I think you're right, as this is the latest Roland "footprint", I mean... Recycling!

Now I've analyzed all the brass and string tones from the BK-9 tone list, and the result really shows that only very, very few tones are taken from the precious SRX library. The statistics is as follows:

187 string and brass tones in total
They stem from the following sources (in brackets percentage figures):
BK-7m: 119 (64 %)
SonicCell: 28 (15 %) (these correspond to the GW8 preset section)
GW 8 L/E World without SRX sounds: 9 (5 %)
XV 5080: 3 (2 %)
SRX 09 World: 8 (4 %) (these are all included in the GW8-L World section!)
SRX 04, 06 and 10: 7 (4 %) (most of them included in GW8-L World)
Unknown source: 14 (7 %) (I didn't check old arrangers, maybe from there)

So, of 187 string and brass tones, only 15 are from SRX boards, and most of them had been in the GW 8 models already. I had hoped that most of the sounds which are not from BK-7m would be SRX sounds, that would have been 68 sounds. Instead, most are taken from the preset WaveROM of former middle class instruments like SonicCell or GW 8. This is what Roland calls "500 all-new tones taken from Roland's library" in the description. - So we needn't think about the BK-9 as a partial alternative of the Integra any more, at least as long as we don't know anything about 'future sound expansions' ;-)