Coreldraw x6. XV5080's resonance is out of 127, Shortcircuit out of 100. XV5080 filter at 30 or so resonance = Shortcircuit at around 90-92. Now on the XV5080, between 30-85 you get a vast range of colours, before the filter starts to self oscillate. With SC, once you go above 95 it self oscillates and the fun stops!
I’ve been out of the music scene for a while now. Since moving to Tokyo a year and a half ago, I’ve started a new career path, and I don’t have much time to pay attention to the music industry anymore. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a keyboard programming project for a school in Taipei, which required a few classic rompler1 sounds.
Like many keyboardists and synthesizer enthusiasts, I went through a rompler phase. If you’re reading this, you probably know what I’m talking about. My rompler phase took place during college, where I was obsessed with trying to identify classic rompler patches in Top 40 hits from the late 90s. For some reason, I thought my parents would be interested to know that the song we were listening to featured a Yamaha MOTIF piano sound.
Before moving to Tokyo, I owned a Yamaha MOTIF XF8 and Roland XV-5050. Csi games. Unfortunately, I chose to sell everything before moving because it didn’t make sense to move to a new country with a rack case and a gigantic keyboard workstation. Fast forward to 2020 – I was so excited to be able to work on a project that called for some classic Roland rompler goodness. Now that I’m all settled in and comfortable in Tokyo, I had the perfect excuse to pick up a used Roland XV-5080 or a new Roland INTEGRA-7.
During my eBay research process, I stumbled upon Roland Cloud – Roland’s subscription VST product featuring digital recreations of a variety of iconic instruments. I briefly checked out Roland Cloud when it first came out, but didn’t end up keeping it because there weren’t many useful sounds for the stuff I was working on. I was shocked to see Roland had added the JV-1080 and XV-5080 to Roland Cloud – and they apparently did so all the way back in 2017. In other words, I missed out on two years of Roland magic. Shame on me. Launchpad music app.
Anyway, I signed up for a Roland Cloud subscription, and spent the last two days playing through some of my favorite JV/XV patches. In an ideal world, I’d take hardware over software, but shelling out $500 for a used XV-5080 versus $20/month for Roland Cloud doesn’t make financial sense at this time because diapers and baby food are expensive. I do miss the grittiness of the old hardware units though. At some point, I’ll have to experiment with running the Roland Cloud recreations through a preamp to get some analog saturation and color.
It’s 2020. If you’re going through a quarter-life nostalgic phase like me, get yourself a subscription of Roland Cloud. I promise it’ll make you smile.