Roland W-30

are these very much fun? is the sequencer intuitive/ easy to use? criticism ?

meant to be good - apparently Prodigy's Experience was mostly done with one of these...

and music for the jilted generation

old hardware sampler are doorstops especially those with no flash RAM

Liam Howlet used one because he couldn't really afford to use anything else and in built the sequencer was quite good for its time

Hadn't heard of the W30 before reading this thread yesterday, and this morning I totally randomly skimmed through the cover of No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, where their keyboardist plays one in his "live shot". That's very cosmic.

I have one sitting in my room. I've been borrowing it from a friend for a while.

It's supposed to have a cool resonant filter, but you can't map it to the pitch or mod wheels or anything. I think it can be controlled by velocity though. 12 bit samples and multiple outs are cool.

That being said, I haven't seriously bothered trying to figure it out yet.

  On 3/23/2010 at 10:14 AM, BCM said:

meant to be good - apparently Prodigy's Experience was mostly done with one of these...

he also used the AKAI mpc's... there's an interview somewhere. he'd sample his synths and stuff, make loops with the MPCs, then sequence the MPCs from the roland W30 -- as well as use the W30's sampling for some bits and bobs. i recall he said it did strings really nicely, because of some forward/backward playing feature.

i'd just get an akai mpc 1000 instead of fucking about with a w-30... but i'd love to play with one, maybe would pay $100-200 just for the lulz of having it and seeing what liam used

edit: found it.

  Quote

"I remember going down to the music shop in Chelmsford and saying 'What do I need?' I was going to buy a Roland S-10 Sampler and a little sequencer but the guy in the shop said, 'Wait a couple of months, there's this new thing coming out. It's like a workstation in one keyboard.' It was like, 'Man that sounds good.' I got the W-30 and, you know, for about four months I didn't go out. I stayed in every day with the headphones on learning how the thing worked. Man, I just had to learn that keyboard inside and out. "

 

"You know, I don't like talking about this, because it gives the secrets away... but here's what we do. Say we've got ten tracks in the set. Right, we hold the samples in bulk on the Akai which holds 32 megs and then use the W-30 to sequence the songs. Take Poison, off our Music for a Jilted Generation album. The opening bars are stored in eightb ar sections which I can call up using the W-30. It usually takes Simon my keyboard tech about five minutes to load each one up before the show. "

 

"Everything's triggered from the W-30s. My set up at the moment is two W-30s and a spare one for the road, disks, and disks of sounds for the samplers. It's for stuff played between the tracks, you know, the links: one of the W-30's really good features is the 'loop-back' facility where the sound can go forward and loop back on itself. I dunno why but Akai have never done that. It's such a useful feature for getting smooth string sounds. "

 

"On some tracks, the loops are played live. Instead of sequencing them I've got two or four bars of the track all on different keys and I actually play them in. It's really primitive, but it's also cool because you can swap it around and mess it about. Of course you have to be precise with what you play, but I always have a safety drum roll either side of the key so if my finger slips off the key, which happens all the time, I can just roll it in and start it again. It's really spontaneous. It works and it's exciting."

i thought this page was good. sound samples and some details... bit old tho

http://www.synthmania.com/w-30.htm

  On 3/25/2010 at 3:03 AM, ieafs said:

you're not liam howlett

and i don't want to be!!

i do, however, believe in the value of figuring out his mindset, his working style, that went into those albums. i'm not going to go duplicate it, but there will be bits and snippits i can integrate into my own efforts.

naw man you got me wrong. i'm interested in this gear because it's cheap ( 20 years old) and i've heard good things about it,, the sound, the sound of the sampler, multi outs etc

  On 3/25/2010 at 5:07 AM, yek said:

naw man you got me wrong. i'm interested in this gear because it's cheap ( 20 years old) and i've heard good things about it,, the sound, the sound of the sampler, multi outs etc

then go for it. if you've heard good things, that means others have too... if it's not your thing, you can sell it off and get your money back.