This year Roland celebrate 50 years in the music business. To mark this they have created an illuminating product timeline from the launch of their first proto drum machines to the present day. It’s a fun place to spend a few minutes and, if you have any history at all with Roland products, it is a place you’ll find products you either owned or wanted.
Roland play a central role in my own history with music and music tech. So much so that I can’t imagine my own timeline without Roland products but this isn’t by design. I’ve never been what would today be called a ‘fanboy’, I have no particular allegiance to Roland, it’s just that at various stages in my development there have been Roland products.
While not yet even a teenager I was fascinated by synthesisers. As an 11 year old in 1982 I had close to zero information available to me about these exciting machines about which I knew almost nothing. Sightings of synths on Top of the Pops, sometimes with the manufacturer’s names obscured by tape because of BBC advertising rules, were all I had. Any information I did get was given undue significance.
I’d seen Roland emblazoned across the back of a large grey synth which had a row of brightly coloured buttons on TV and this glimpse of what I later learned was a Jupiter 8 was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I’ve since seen one in the flesh but am yet to play one.
It was around this time that I started playing in my first band. At 11 the distinction between playing and ‘playing’ was fuzzy but we wrote (terrible) songs on a borrowed analogue keyboard, a Roland EP20 from the early 70s. You’ll probably have to look it up as it’s hardly a classic. Actually it was dreadful. Horrid waterfall keyboard with brass leaf contacts and very strong springs which gave the keybed a ‘ruler being twanged over the edge of a desk’ quality. The sounds were horrifying too. But it said Roland on the side and I didn’t know better so I bashed out triads as we learned songs by ear.
Rather than offer images of the products I’ll be referencing, instead we have found them in the fascinating Google Street View of the Roland R&D centre in Japan. Here’s their SH1000, apparently the first Japanese synth!
That horrendous keybed would come back to haunt me in the form of an 1972 SH1000 monosynth I bought from a second hand shop in probably 1983. It was the best synth I’d ever played - OK, it was the only synth I’d ever played. It had the same horrible keyboard and some unconvincing preset sounds but it did have basic (and very odd) synth facilities. Best forgotten, as indeed it was when I left it at a studio in the early 90s. It had been in the garage for years but a band wanted to borrow it for a photoshoot for their CD artwork. I never went back for it…
Reading thus far you might wonder how this tale of two flawed products from the early 70s resulted in me having such affection for Roland? This is due to the next products which presented themselves at just the right time.
The first was an SH101. Acquired through a swap, I still have this, though it’s in need of some attention from a tech. For all its flimsiness the SH101 is a proper synth. The front panel teaches proper subtractive architecture, the waveforms are raw and buzzy, the filter is classic Roland and the arpeggiator, portamento and the inclusion of noise as a source in the modulation section allowing sample and hold patches, means this could make some great noises. Add a bucket brigade delay pedal and you’re in business!
Of course a monosynth is a bit restrictive and when in 1988 I found a second hand Juno 106 in my local music shop my memories of that big grey Jupiter 8 from years ago were rekindled. It wasn’t the same synth but it was big and grey and said Roland across the back. That was close enough for me! At the time analogue synths were very out of favour, and very cheap. I believe I paid £150, from a shop!
Although some think of the 106 as the poor relation in the trio of ‘proper’ Junos, I think this is unfair. The oscillators were DCOs but that just means stable tuning to me, the chorus helped fatten up a synth which ultimately could have done with more oscillators but it had memories and MIDI. If you ever get the opportunity to try one here’s a tip for a faux version of the THX Deep Note. Prime all 6 oscillators by pressing 6 random notes across the whole keyboard, press both Poly buttons to switch to monophonic, engage the portamento and hit a note in the centre of the keyboard. All those oscillators will converge on that one note and you can ride the portamento rate in real time. It’s a huge sound!
I approached my local studio to see if I could blag my way into any sessions and while the owner wasn’t interested in me, he was interested in my Juno. I lent it to the studio and kind of came along with it. When in the studio I found a collection of more Roland gear. Specifically an Alpha Juno 2 an SH09 (cool synth but that dreadful keyboard again), an R8 drum machine and a TB303. Paired with an Akai ASQ10 hardware MIDI sequencer and a rackmount 12 bit Boss delay I had everything I needed to make the early 90’s minimal techno I thought was my musical destiny at the time…
Highlights of that gear would be the Alpha Juno which, in spite of looking like a DX7, was an analogue synth. Famous now for the Hoover sound it was quite versatile, though frustrating to program. The R8 was an uninspiring looking drum machine which sounded excellent, it took ROM cards with additional sounds and could create sequenced synth basses as part of the patterns. The SH09 was excellent for pulsing drones courtesy of its square wave LFO and sounded great with some early 90s Large Plate from a Quadraverb!
The TB303 was very much in the ascendancy at this point in the early 90s and our unit has been bought for a song a few years earlier. It was always under threat of being sold as the prices spiralled and while an awful piece of hardware, and impossible to program in any other way than a squiggly, incessant loop, it had a unique character and while ultimately overrated, was enormous fun!
This combination of gear illustrated two things to me which were equally important. I was better at figuring out gear than I was at writing techno and however much fun hardware sequencers were, they were frustrating to use and a computer could do a better job. A borrowed Atari ST convinced me and a PC and a version of Cubasis set in motion a series of events which ultimately led to the purchase of a Digidesign 001 and a copy of Pro Tools LE 5.
Though long since sold, I miss that Juno 106 and I loved finding the Roland Cloud instruments. If it wasn’t for Roland my life might have turned out very differently. And we’re both 50 years old. There must be some poetic point trying to get out there somehow.
As a final point, considering how much of this article has focused on the questionable quality of the keyboards on Roland products from the early 70s it would be remiss of me not to mention that, as someone who is fussy about keyboards, my favourite weighted, hammer action keybed is the Roland PHA (Progressive Hammer Action) as found in Roland’s current piano products.
If you want to explore the Roland 50th anniversary timeline click the button below and see how things have developed.