Factory Reset

I bought a Roland D-10 Multi Timbral Linear Synthesizer on E-bay. It's about 10kg of 1988 in keyboard form. It's about the oldest thing around that can wired up with midi and play drums and upto 8 other instruments simultaneously.

Roland D10

It has some awesome sounds and some utter duds. Strings are completely out, and the pianos are no way near as good as the later JV-80 and JV-1080 although I understand some of these are designed to sit nicely within a mix rather than sound good on their own, which probably means Roland get the last laugh in a million places where those sounds haven't been noticed. The organ and brass sounds are completely awesome. A-53 Brassy Lead justified buying the synth on its own, it's a layered brass synth sound reminiscent the intro to Europe's The Final Countdown, which was done with the analog Roland JX-8P layered with a Yamaha TX7 (Rack version of DX7).

The D series has limited memory, 128 tones and 128 patches (combinations of one or two tones or partials) when in performance mode, and when mine arrived, it was littered with evidence that its former owner had spent a very long time refining several patches and left a lot of copies of them. I confess to doing the same from time to time. I didn't find his patches particularly exciting, so I thought I'd try a factory reset. Bad move. The secret code didn't restore the factory patches, it just made every patch make a nasty eeeeeeee sound. The same nasty sound. I had to go and find a System Exclusive (.syx) file containing the original files and send it across by midi using a sysex program. I haven't yet found anything that does this on linux so I had to wrangle with Vista and a gammeport midi cable. Additional problems were caused by my not being able to find the original patches for the D-10. Until I realised the D-20 had identical patches. Synthzone.com to the rescue. There's also some more interesting patchsets.

The D-10 is a D-20 without an attempt at a sequencer. Given the choice of wrestling with a tiny dot-matrix display and a few undoubtedly worn out push buttons or the rich mouse-and-keyboard driven environment of a PC running a favourite sequencer (Rosegarden) is nominally easy, I thought I'd save myself both money and the temptation to do anything really masochistic. Rolands are not known for being easy to program, not for having particularly friendly manuals. I think this one has the biggest of any I own, although the midi implementation is probably the best described.