Post
by cornutt » Mon Apr 03, 2017 9:56 pm
Rest in peace to Mr. Kakhashi. He took a company from being a small Japanese manufacturer of drum machines (back when Japanese products still hadn't completely shaken off the 1960s reputation of "cheap") to a worldwide leader in the music industry.
I've got a lot of Roland gear. There are a couple of pieces that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with, but overall, they have served me well. My observation about Roland has been that they run in cycles. They don't do much for a few years, and then every once in a while you get this explosion of creativity and new products. In the mid-70s it was the System 100 and the modulars. In the early '80s it was the Jupiters, Junos and MIDI. Around 1990 it was the JD-800, 990, and the S-series samplers. In the early 2000s it was the V-Synth and the DJ products. And now it's the JD-Xa, the System-8, the Boutique synths, the System 500, etc.
Switches, knobs, buttons, LEDs, LCD screens, monitors, keys, mice, jacks, sockets. Now two joysticks!