A little phrase that sums up something odd you will notice in synthesis land – the machine that is crafted with attention and love and yet at the last moment some bizarre cost cutting decision by committee has been made that brings the whole thing to its knees. It’s not only Roland that does this – but they sure are good at it.
The JD-XA with a shiny unto very shiny front panel with red lettering you can’t read. Had they included eight analogue voices the mob would have forgiven them, it would have been a huge win for the company – but four was just a bit meh (I don’t mind but others did big time). Same biz with a JP08 which comes with 04 voices. Clunk! The SH-32 which has 32 voices – or ONE if you try use synch.
Or take the Korg Volcas which were pretty good reminders of classical drum machines and squawk boxes – but unable to sequence over multiple patterns so you have to do it manually. Gee that would have been an extra 5 bucks.
How about the DeepMind having a fantastic audio effects facility, with audio inputs right there on the circuit board – and no connections to provide audio in. Five bucks.
I’m sure you can think of others.
My Roland $5 is Studiologic, restricting aftertouch and the mod wheel to the same destination on the Sledge 2 Black ( which is what I have, can’t speak for the yellow banana version ). They’ve basically abandoned it: no updates since 2.5.2, and the known INIT patch bug which came from porting the Blofeld OS into a machine which doesn’t fully implement it causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, they do not reply to queries. That aside, it’s a bloody great synth- all controls in front of me, a reverb release which runs for ~17 minutes ( yes, I timed it, had time to brew up and make a sandwich ) and extra filters available with MIDI CCs.