Roland 50th Anniversary

Pretty cool site - a shame it all went slowly down hill from the 80s :slight_smile:

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Something like that and someone liked to say not chasing the ghost what a laff. I hope the revival plans include the V-Synth and hopefully a new groovebox!

I don’t know, the 2010s–present have been pretty good to me. the MC-101/707 are hands-down my favorite of the Roland grooveboxes and some of my favorite gear full stop. I’m not a big beats guy, but I hear similarly great things about the TR-8S/6S. The MV-1 is pushing boundaries in really interesting ways. And easily my most hotly anticipated piece of kit in the upcoming year is the perpetually-sold-out-everywhere SP-404mkII.

System-500 is doing eurorack stuff. FANTOM is an absolute bonkers workstation. INTEGRA is the best SoundCanvas yet. And GAIA and the boutiques are all cute, tweakable, and fun.

Feels to me like, across the things I think of as “Roland”, this has been their best decade.

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Almost forgot about this, but I signed up and am now waiting breathlessly for the spa- I mean 50 years of celebration emails from Roland.

I was amused by the “thanks for being a fan of Roland” part because there was a time that I was part of the hater crowd because of lack of new analog synths from Roland. But I kind of am a fan these days thanks to the MC-707 - it ain’t perfect as a groovebox but as a synth it sounds good good I have little desire for other synths now.

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Hmm., maybe a new Roland DJ controller and V-Moda headphones.

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If it’s a Jupiter 8 remake instabuy. Anything else is boring

I can only imagine it’s a very difficult balance for a company as storied as Roland to walk the line between endlessly recycling its past glories and throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping it will stick. And I think they’ve done a pretty good job over the past few decades! Their products have consistently combined heritage and new technology in a thoughtful way.

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Roland’s provided me and countless others with a real joy for so many years/decades now. I think they’re still putting out amazing stuff. Even if I didn’t, I can’t relate to this “what have they done for me lately” mentality I hear all too often.

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Well, did not really intent any Roland bashing. All the Roland gear in my collection are new: System 8, System 1, D-05, MC-707 and MX-1.

It is just obvious when you see the progress in this kind of timeline that the 80s gave birth to a lot of legendary synths and the 90/00 not so much.

Today I think Roland is releasing a lot of interesting products.

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The only post-80’s Roland gear that I have are cables

Roland Integra 7 is nice. It contains a lot of history. Also it seems the last Expander that Roland did. Will keep it forever…

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