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Friday, 27 February 2004
RD-700 first impressions ::
A new Roland RD-700 digital piano landed in my doorway Wednesday afternoon.
After getting it unpacked and connected, I spent a long time just playing the piano and electric pianos. Wow. It’s been almost 16 years since I owned a real piano, 19 years since I stopped playing my Fender Rhodes. It was just what I’d hoped for, a really good action and excellent samples that are well tuned to the keyboard.
An SUV for keyboardists
I found a few of my JV-1080's patches and was later surprised to notice that they’re not editable. That’s OK, this instrument is all about touch and a few great sounds; I already have plenty of ways to make new sounds on other instruments.
I found the drum loops and was wondering what the heck they were for, until I discovered all the performance setups with bass, piano and a one-button drummer. Well, that’s OK for practice and fun now and then, but if I ever get the urge to perform or record anything like that, please, someone gives me a good smack on the head!
Its master controller features look good, though I’m only using a couple of other sound modules these days (software synths do the rest).
I went to the gym in the early evening and biked like a hamster on a wheel, swam a couple laps, sat in the spa, then came home and gave my hands a good workout on a David Borden piece. I noticed that the keys on my plastic keyboards are slightly narrower and significantly shorter than the real thing. When I was born, a nurse said, “he’s either going to be a piano player or a thief"—I have big hands, and they just plain fit better on the larger keyboard. On the other hand (sorry), playing tenths in my left hand, easy on the plastic keyboard, is hard on the real keyboard; I can just reach C-E, but A-C# is a big stretch.
Next, I noticed that one passage in the Borden piece, where I always seemed in danger of twisting my fingers in a knot before, was no problem on this keyboard. Ah. The keys are harder to push down, but they bounce back, and one learns to harness that momentum. (It reminded me of snorkeling in Key West; it was windy, and there were big waves, but if I laid still, I didn’t move much. I noticed that for each large push of a wave, there was also a longer and more gentle recoil. I learned to time my strokes so as not to fight the waves.)
Then I tried replacing the QS7 piano sound on the solo I recorded last week with the RD-700's piano. It did not translate well. Leaving it alone, what played as a smooth phrase on the QS7 sounded fumbling on the RD-700 (too much variation), and if I tried to alter the velocity range programmatically, it sounded very artificial. But some manual editing may rescue it.
I then added some Absynth tracks, playing the RD-700. Cool, even bizarre synth patches sound more alive when played from a weighted controller.
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