Users Offering to Pay Roland 4 Soft/Firm Enhancements

I would love some way to control rotary speaker speed using the bender. You could do it on the RD700 but it is not possible on the FA.

Failing that, using the D Beam would be just as good. Also not possible on the FA.

Thanks, Tim.

Regards,
Joe

I would pay to have Roland upgrade the sequencer to do pattern chaining, allowing say 4-6 separate patterns in one song, then arrange them however you wish. The FA sequencer is a powerful tool, but linear sequencing in this day and age seems a bit inconvenient . As Joe P said, controlling the rotary effect from the mod lever would be good as well, even my nephew's Casio can do this from the mod wheel!

The ability to overwrite existing patches would be good as well, I really don't want to take up 100+ user patches where all I've done is edit or change the MFX on a preset.

Joe P, you can switch the rotary between slow and fast by bender lever and also with D-Beam! It is only a Controler 1 (Modulation) order. Assign this controller to D-Beam and you can work with it. Push the bender lever foreward, it send automaticly Controler 1 (and switch the rotary to fast). Is it this, what you mean?
I assigned the Controler 1 to the S1 knob and change the speed of the rotary therewith. Very easy by playing organ.

Candy

1. Software Editor (though I'd be out of luck because I'm on 10.6.8 and I'm sure they wouldn't support that).

I see they made 1 for the Juno DS-61!

2. A way to assign MFX On and Off to S1/S2 or external controller.

That is absolutely the biggest blunder in this keyboard IMHO.

3. It appears from my recent experiments that Audio input from the rear panel "guitar" jack does not pass through any "Guitar Simulator" effects. They're only in MFX and IFX, neither of which is in line with the audio input from a guitar you might plug. Unless I'm missing something, that's just plain ignorant.

4. Something about the pads - I forget because I hadn't used them for a while, but it was something about the Hold button. I think I was looking for a 1 - shot - press the pad and it plays the entire sample length. I don't want to have to press the hold button first every time. Hold should be for looping the sample over again once it reaches the end, and then there should be a one pass thing. I can't remember exactly what it was, and I could be wrong here too, but I know something about it irked me.

Would I pay them for it?

Absolutely. When Roland responds to their customers requests and provides representatives to monitor and assist on forums (assume this one is not "official" but what's on their website is not a forum that I can tell and it never comes up in searches) I'll buy another device from them in the future.

Until then, this is probably my last Roland product and I'll go to Yamaha and let them ignore me for a while instead.

I've supported them and recommended them for years. I understand everyone is going to make products that don't do everything that everyone wants but the FA really has some shortcomings that just simply shouldn't be there.

Love the replies everyone. I am a software developer not in music at all but i do know by seeing how the modern keyboards work that they could easily snap-in enhancements to workflow, shortcuts... maybe an extra FX here or there or a couple sample,sequencer features.

Of course there is a large industry that provides software upgrades for DAW all the time for money and make a very good living out of it, and just not sure why the synth manufactures don't do the same for their hardware. There a great number of us that strongly prefer using hardware as much as possible to reduce the number of hours we are in front of a computer screen that doesn't feel fun at all.

Anyway please keep responding. Also loved the part about letting "Yamaha ignore me for a while"... So true they all ignore us little guys.

I'd happily pay for an application that could create EXP expansion files/bundles - containing user samples etc. :)

Candy wrote:

Joe P, you can switch the rotary between slow and fast by bender lever and also with D-Beam! It is only a Controler 1 (Modulation) order. Assign this controller to D-Beam and you can work with it. Push the bender lever foreward, it send automaticly Controler 1 (and switch the rotary to fast). Is it this, what you mean?
I assigned the Controler 1 to the S1 knob and change the speed of the rotary therewith. Very easy by playing organ.

Candy

Hey Candy - thanks. I am using S1 now.

I looked into this pretty exhaustively, but I know you are one of the most knowledgeable users here so I hope I am wrong.

What you are describing sounds like using the lever, but using the modulation action on it instead of the bender action. I have two problems with this. First, there is a risk of activating pitch bend when changing rotary speed in the heat of battle, second, it is momentary (can it be switched to latch?).

I hope I am wrong. Also, can you explain a little more about using the D Beam?

I had corresponded with Roland Customer Support about this very topic and after a lot of back and forth we decided it was not possible. Please tell me I am wrong!

On my RD700, using the bender action of the lever changed rotary speed by default on TW tones..

Thank you,
Joe

timswiley wrote:

Love the replies everyone. I am a software developer

Hey Tim, if you're a software designer, write us an editor for god's sake :-)

You know what we need is a "Virtual Controller" that allows one to send SysEx messages.

Just a bunch of knobs, sliders, and buttons that you could assign messages to.

Roland's A 800/500/300 pro does this, but you can't send the messages from the software - you have to transmit them to the physical controller and then you can send the messages.

I'm sure all the editors for various devices, that's all they really do - you turn a knob and it sends sysex messages (in hexidecimal I suppose).

Reaper has a MIDI panel where you can switch the User Interface and see it only as sliders. You can assign CC messages to them but not SysEx, but something like that is halfway there!

Of course there are a TON of messages in the FA, but even to be able to just do some basic tone editing for each of the supported tones on a single part would be amazing.

I just re-loaded the factory songs which have the factory samples so know I know what I don't like about the Hold button:

1. When you press a pad, you should be able to set it to play any sample through once, or loop without having to stand there and hold the pad.

2. When you press hold, it should hold any sample button you press at any time (up to 4 total). It'd be nice if the pads could individually be set to one shot or loop, but even if you could set the whole pad set (all 48 per song) to one that would be OK.

But what I want to do is press Pad 1 to trigger a loop and have it play, and then add Pad 2 in later.

The problem with the way it is now is, you can press Pad 2 while Pad 1 is holding, but you have to hold the Pad 2 button manually to get it to play along with Pad 1.

I wouldn't care if you could only play 4 maximum, but I'd like to be able to trigger 1, then add 2, 3, and 4 in.

Maybe I want a drum loop on Pad 1, and different bass patterns on Pads 12, 14, and 16. So I'd like Pad 1 to hold and keep looping and when I press pad 12, it starts playing its loop and keeps going. Then I could either press 12 to turn it off, or add 14 in. But 1 would keep going.

As it stands now, you have to press and hold Hold, and press all of the Pads you want to play together.

But, if you press Hold again, it stops.

Again, just pretty useless. It's basically like the Hold button is a Sustenuto pedal that allows you up to 4 notes at a time, and that's it. To stop any 1 of the 4 and change it to something else involves completely stopping the sound. there's no way to keep things going while you switch loops.

Pretty stupid.

Alas, now I at least know you could buy as large a capacity memory card that will work, and load as many wav (or mp3 for smaller) files as will fit, and load them into your sample pads.

You could absolutely have a complete sound effects library in the FA. That's actually pretty impressive when you think about it.

stevel wrote:

1. When you press a pad, you should be able to set it to play any sample through once, or loop without having to stand there and hold the pad.

Did you consider to use the GATE switch in the sample edit menu?

bennyseven wrote:

stevel wrote:

1. When you press a pad, you should be able to set it to play any sample through once, or loop without having to stand there and hold the pad.

Did you consider to use the GATE switch in the sample edit menu?

Nope, and that's exactly what I needed!!!!!

I thought I tried it before.

Now all I have to do is figure out when you have 4 samples going and looping, which one gets cut off when you add a 5th pad in - I think it cuts off the earliest 1 pressed so you couldn't have a rhythm track on pad 1 and then add in more than 3 or it will cut off your rhythm track. Gonna have to play with it now!!!

Thanks Benny


Edit: well, I figured out that if you press up to 4 pads, then go back and press #1 again it will turn it off. So the trick is to de-select one of the 2nd through 4th pads to keep the first one playing. As long as you never add more than 3, the original track will keep going. Of course since you can press up to 4 pads at a time, it is possible to make some happening combinations! Then some can be gated and some could not...now it might actually be useful!!!!

Joe P., of course you can use the D-Beam, but also not in latch-mode. It allows a very expressive way to play your organ. Press shift+Assign (from the D-Beam). Switch D-Beam to on and turn the D-Beam Switch to Assignable. Set D-Beam Assign to CC1 (Modulation). Thats it. How I told, you can't switch it in the Latch-Mode, I think, this is only possible with the S1 or S2-Buttons.

Candy

At a minimum a Librarian Editor would be great.

It would be great if a complete SW suite of tools were available like the John Melas software bundle you can buy for the Motif line. I can't confirm, but I'm sure John has made some good money off of these popular tools. I use the tools for my MOXF and it makes the process so easy to the point where I decided to use the MOXF as my master controller and FA as the slave instead of vice-versa.

Where to begin, maybe fix all the bugs first before adding new features?! There are so many to list it's a bit embarrassing really...

But unless this is done by a 3rd party company, then I'm not interested at all, in fact I find the entire idea disgusting. It is perpetuating the micro payment society which allows companies to distance themselves from a functioning product on release. Paying more money to get a company to do the job right at a later date is just wrong. This exact issue happened in the world of gaming, and now look at it - micropayments bloody everywhere, pay for DLCs, games releasing incomplete, you name it, they found a way to capitilize on it and be as lazy as possible with the product. I'm just totally against the perpetuation of this into the music industry. Rather than expect features to be added to devices, study the device you want to purchase in great detail. Buy a product that gives you growing room.

If the idea of micropayments and constantly paying money to some company to fix something is appealing then I'd suggest you use a PC to make music instead of the FA, as this is how a PC functions (with regards to updates, micro-payments, etc).

HOWEVER

If it's a 3rd party company who can hack the firmware of the FA and add to it, I'm down. Sounds unusual, but I really believe that we pay enough to Roland already for the equipment, and I don't believe in encouraging them to release [even more] incomplete products, like the gaming industry. I'd love to see the sequencer become non-linear (use pads for different patterns - a lot of us remember that Roland UK video where the rep said they wanted fans to suggest other uses for the pads, but they never followed through on that one!), but the biggest feature I'd like to see is opening up the functionality of the pads to do midi tasks (which would allow for almost any manipulation of sound!), and for midi control to be properly functioning for external devices rather than just internal - missed opportunity there! But we can know for certain that update will never happen as they just released the new controller keyboard for those functions. (https://www.roland.com/global/products/rd-2000/)

The FA has some truely powerful features, but seems to just cut short on everything which seems to constantly inspire these kinds of "update request" threads. I think what we all really want is a new Fantom!