Roland XV-3080

[F5D]

I will get a Roland XV-3080 sound module tomorrow. I just found one second hand. I have never used any of the jv-series or xv-series romplers like 1080, 2080 etc. but I had a Roland Vintage Synth module a couple of years ago and liked it. The 3080 should have enough polyphony (128 voices) and stereo samples (+mono), JV-2080 sounds + some jd990 sounds too. All my synth are analog or virtual analog etc. so this rompler should be a good addition to my setup for good quality bread and butter sounds.

Do you guys know which expansion cards I should buy for the synth?

It has 2 SRX slots and 4 SR-JV slots. I have already decided to purchase the Ultimate keys srx-card which includes the sounds from vintage synth, keyboards of the 60's and 70's, bass & drum and "selected sounds" from session and piano cards.

[Summa]

Nice architecture with postfilter Ringmod and Booster (Distortion/Waveshaping) structures, it's a shame using it for bread and butter sounds only. Not exactly easy to programm but imho worth it...

[F5D]

I got the 3080 yesterday. It seems to be a good sound module for what it's been designed for. Very well built and the sound quality is good. However, most of the patches are almost useless, especially the jv2080 banks. XV-sounds are much better. I like some of the acoustic guitar and string patches and there are lots of other good sounds too.

There's one thing I have to say. I HATE choir aahs and other vox-sounds!

I don't understand why roland use so much vox sounds and most of the pads are ruined by vox-waveforms. Shame. Of course I can edit them and I will! Anyway, I will get the ultimate keys -card which should give the synth a big boost.

Of course I will experiment with the synth and make some wild sounds too.

[F5D]

I just tried to edit the sounds for the first time. Of course the editing is alot slower than with any analog synth because all edits must be done in menus but it's not too difficult if you know what the parameters do.

I just made 2 huge pads which sound fantastic! None of the preset pads sound this big. The built in fx unit is very good and even the reverb which it produces is very smooth. There are basically 4 choises, reverb, room, hall and plate. The Hall can sound really big if needed and the room sounds like a room.

The multi fx part gives all kinds of choruses, phasers, flangers, distortions and enhancer which works very nicely.

The filter sounds ok. I haven't tried resonance yet but I usually never need it anyway and I guess it's not as good as virtual analog synths have. I just need to get a midi controller that I can tweak the cutoff and some other parameters faster.

I really like a parameter "Analog feel", which modulates the oscillators in a nice way when you turn the level up. So you don't always have to use lfo's to modulate oscillator pitch.

I'm gonna program alot more sounds with this thing. It seems that the synth has many many good waveforms for sound design and the fx unit really makes a great final touch to the sound. It's just that the preset sounds are mostly quite boring (not really a surprise) instead of some nice acoustic sound presets.

I bought this machine for acoustic sounds, strings and digital pads and it seems to do a nice job in that area. I will try some harder more distorted sounds soon too.

[AlexHall74]

Have you thought about using a MIDI editor/librarian, like MIDIquest?

Check out the demo at www.squest.com

It might be easier than dicking with the menus...I hated the menus on my Motif ES Rack.

Just a thought.

[F5D]

In fact there's an editor for the roland xv series at roland usa website (for pc and mac). I tried it and it's ok but some parameters are faster to tweak from the synth's own menu, for example the oscillator waveform. In the editor I didn't find a way to scroll thru the waveforms (selecting from the list with mouse is slow) but you can turn the knob from the synth's front panel and scroll really fast.