New to Keyboards and bought a Roland D-50

[Mr Kipling]

HI Everyone. Total noobie to Keyboards so please bear with me!

Hope you're all sitting comfortably... I'll begin!

Basically, I'm a Bass player but always been a massive admirer of Synths going back to the 80's but never got around to using/playing them properly. A friend of mine had a DX7 and a Roland D-50 in the late 80's and I always loved the sounds he got from them both in the band we were in together. Which brings me onto the next part.. I've just bought a fairly good quality D-50 from Ebay in an attempt to play around and actually get round to learning how to play properly (Don't laugh we all got to start sometime!)..

Anyway.. received it yesterday and I'm over the moon with it. Both joysticks are still there (they usually snap off I've heard) and after a good cleanup it looks almost new! Had a little play around with it but without reading the manual I'm a little stuck on a couple of things which I was hoping a D-50 expert might be able to help me with at all?

1. A lot of the patches are completely different to what I've seen when it comes to demo's of the D-50, does this mean a previous user has swapped them over? I was really hoping to have little go of the famous pizzagogo patch and impress my wife (who's a big enya fan) but it's not there? How do I go about getting it back, and is there anywhere I could possibly download custom D-50 patches from somewhere instead of using a data card (which I don't have)? I'm a massive Rush fan and would love to learn Subdivisions so would be looking for a kind of Oberheim OBX sound..

2. I bought an E-mu xmidi1x1 USB-MIDI interface lead for around £30 hoping that I might be able to link it up to my laptop and perhaps use it in a sequencer or something.. I've got a trial version of Reason, but when I connect it up to the D-50 and press MIDI, nothing happens.. Am I doing something wrong? The cable has a USB powered part that lights up and has IN/OUT lights but they don't light up when connecting up. Again it could be me I suppose!

Anyway apologies for boring you to death, but if anyone could shed any light and offer any advice it would help a complete beginner out bigtime.. Thank you.

[Mr Kipling]

Update.. Just been doing a search on the E-mu xmidi1x1 USB-MIDI interface lead and found that the IN and OUT leads actually swap around when plugging into the keyboard!! I.e IN goes into OUT on the keyboard..

Well you learn something new everyday eh?

[Stab Frenzy]

Update.. Just been doing a search on the E-mu xmidi1x1 USB-MIDI interface lead and found that the IN and OUT leads actually swap around when plugging into the keyboard!! I.e IN goes into OUT on the keyboard..

Well you learn something new everyday eh?

Think of it like water flowing out of a tap through a hose, it can't go out at both ends.

[Mr Kipling]

Nicely put!I just thought it would match up like on a PC you see.. Ah well!

Just been searching through this forum and found a link to a site called http://analogkid.us/Patches/

It has a massive Linear file (about 15mb) full of patches, how would I be able to try them out? Does it just replace one bank at a time or the whole set? Is there a way of getting the original factory patches back on at all? Just trying to get pizzagogo back on you see.

[Synthaholic]

The factory patches are all over the 'net, they were originally on a card called PN-D50-00 thru 04. Pizzagogo (and most of the other famous presets) are on the 00 card. The Linear.zip file on analogkid.us/Patches has them, and a zillion others too.

You'll need a sysex utility such as MIDI-OX to load them into your D-50. You'll have to load a bank at a time (64 patches), unless you get a PC D-50 editor.

[Mr Kipling]

Brilliant. I've downloaded that plus a D50 PATCHLOADER which I obtained from this site : http://www.stoffelshome.de/d50_snd.html along with some factory sounds (includes pizzagogo).. It's all in german so I'm hoping it's the right one!

Really looking forward to going home tonight to try the reverse IN OUT situation and see if it works =P~

Many thanks for the advice guys..

[Mr Kipling]

Me again.. Had some problems with that patchloader so downloaded MIDI OX and it works a treat!! At first I couldn't work out how to turn protection off but managed to sort that out in the end! Been uploading loads of different patches and stuff and really getting to grips with it now! Really happy!!

Managed to sync it up with Reason as well, but there is a bit of a delay when I hit a key and the sound coming out of my laptop.. Could that be a latency issue?

[Yoozer]

If you have a bog-standard on-board soundcard, then that's indeed latency, even though Reason's generally doing its best to keep it low.

A stopgap solution is ASIO4ALL, but you're off better buying a decent soundcard.

[Mr Kipling]

Hi again. I ended up dropping the latency itself in Reason and it's working fine.

Been getting some patches from various places as well.. Managed to sort out the uploading problem by pressing MIDI then DATA TRANSFER/BULK LOAD/ENTER.. Even found the perfect Oberheim OBX fat sound.. Sounds exactly like Subdivisions by Rush!!

Is it possible to create my own bank at all? I've seen some wonderful patches but maybe only 1 or 2 sounds I like from each one, could I therefore make a best of out of say 5-6 patches by ripping some out of them?