Re: Sitarist inte...Handsonic

[SoundFNR@aol.com]

> have you heard one yet? essentially they have gone to all the trouble of
>  truly micing the various 600 + instruments this machine holds in the 
>best
>  most professional manner. 

yes, I've heard one.
and the other Roland gear which shares samples.
...and I somewhat dispute what you say.

600 instruments? I doubt it.
Roland wavetable synths have many 100's of patches,
but these are derived from a limited number of samples.
OK , there's probably over 100 samples, but many of these
are Roland's useless phrases, (and some are digital waveforms).
Actually you don't get that many instruments.

Out of the samples you do get, most are acceptable but
many have unwanted extraneous sounds.
Where the samples are looped, some are good, but
some are really obvious.
Sound quality isn't anywhere near pro-studio 
standards.( not to say the sounds are unusable though)

To really use the Roland stuff IMHO you need to 
program your own patches (although I did
find the Handsonic Djembe to be very playable)

The whole idea seems to be to create an "instrument"
that sounds impressive on demo (in the shop, and on
the roland CD), some of what seem 
to be impressive and useful sounds are actually part of a 
single phrase sample which is musically useless.

Roland don't have any facility for user feedback
(er...just like Yamaha) so I guess they don't
much care.

A good example.... the Roland gamelan patches
all sustain after Note-Off. Anyone with a vague 
knowledge of Gamelan would know that this
renders a Gamelan simulation impossible.

Well, all this in interest of balance.
I'm now a JV-1010 owner (+Asia exp) so
I speak from experience.

Ultimately  I'll be triggering the Roland samples from
my guitar, in the interest of combining some
contrasting sounds with the guitar pallet
......but its going to take a lot of patch programming to
make it work. 

also the sample mice keep hiding in the skirting board 

andy butler