Roland Cloud promo - 2 permanent instruments for $199

[Guy Rowland]

Getting more interesting - Roland Cloud has a promo until Dec 31st that you get to keep 2 instruments after paying $199 for a year. $100 per instrument is definitely getting more like it. Note - this appears to be a one-off promo, you don't get 2 instruments every year, just 1 after the first 12 months. Full details - https://rolandcloud.com/promo-details

[Jaap]

Mmm thats nice and tempting indeed. Used the Roland Cloud a while back for a project and loved it though I did not see any reason yet beside inner nerdyness to continue, but this might change it

[Guy Rowland]

Inner nerdyness sums it up rather well for me too, Jaap.

I just signed up to the free trial. For some reason, the Cloud Manager app appears MASSIVE on my monitors - I think because I have 4, 1 above, it thinks I have 1 ginormous monitor, which is a bit annoying - I had to do lots of scrolling around to make it do anything, but I got the basics done in the end.

So far I've dived into the legendary stuff, and what can I say - it all sounds and behaves impeccably. There's a uniformity in the option controls which is pleasing, its quick to find your way around the virtual versions, despite every UI being faithful to the original. Browsers are all archaic, which fits the retro theme but I think they could take a leaf out of Arturia's book there. I was suprised there weren't more patches for some of the synths, but no doubt you can download more from somewhere.

Essentially this is largely the thill of having all this stuff at your fingertips, if you just have to have the D-50 Fantasia, there it is. Its good that all these synths have the simple front panels and expand out to edit. There are a few synths that seems most interesting in their virtual forms - the System 100 and System 8 seemed potentially bottomless, with the latter sporting all kinds of funky filters under the hood, including Juno 106 and Jupiter 8 ones alongside formants and all sorts. Similarly the osc sections you can switch out. Kinda like a Diva conceptually I guess. The TR808 and 909 felt essentially perfect compared to hardware - I very briefly owned a 909 and it brought it all back.

I haven't even looked at the other areas yet, there's certainly plenty to get your teeth into. This does feel like a good deal. I sort of view it as 2 synths for $200, and you get a year to play around with the whole collection to decide which is most useful to you.

[Jaap]

Yes it feels very natural and I owned a D50 and JV1080 in the past and it was a bless to work with this version.

It was already a few months ago that I used it, but that manager thingie annoyed the heck out of me though haha, as clever as they rebuild these synths, they certainly did not think through the efficiency of the cloud manager though. It was not big for me, but it constantly popped up, crashed, refused to go away etc. At the end there was an update that seem to make it better, but stopped a few days after that so I have my hopes high
Though it annoyed me, the synths made up for everything and they ran smooth as butter in my DAW.

[wst3]

Maybe I am an old grump, but so far the only one that really interests me is the Super Jupiter, and I still have an MKS-80 in the rack, so I'm probably going to pass. But I get the interest level. The System 100 could be fun, but I am still lost in Softube Modular<G>!

[Lawrence]

Guy, back in the day that “Fantasia” patch and “Staccato Heaven” paid for my D-50 at least 20 times over, and I’m not exaggerating.

A few years ago, I needed that sort of sound for an 80s style song that was going in a movie, and I managed to program it fairly easily in Omni, which makes sense-Eric Persing probably programmed both, bless him.

[Guy Rowland]

Omni has a D-50 bells soundsource, doesn't it? I've used that for the D-50 vibe more than a few times, but I could never get a really accurate Fantasia patch... you're probably a better programmer than me! I think I already linked this on another thread, but here's The Mighty God Persing talking us through the Fantasia patch programming (he does others inc the legendary Digital Native Dance in the video)



So I tried to ape his technique, but I'm rubbish me and didn't get super close.

Bill, not wanting to encourage you to buy even MORE synths, but it might be worth singing up for the free trial - 30 days of unrestricted playground. The nice thing is you never input card details, you don't even have to remember to opt out at the end. That System 8 is surprisingly good for one thing. I'll hopefully try some of the other modules later today or tomorrow.

[Guy Rowland]

...aaaand while I'm waiting for a client, I've snuk in listening to a few more Cloud offerings. I tried 3 Anthologies - 1986, 1987 and 1993. In my ignorance I assumed beforehand that these would be greatest hits from different eras, but it turns out they're just sampled versions of specific synths. 1986 is the MKS70, 1987 the D50 and 1993 the JD 990. As such, they're pretty much a one trick pony - the factory presets of these synths with basic controls of ADSR, filter, an LFO and fx.

The MKS70 was a not entirely welcome nostalgia rush for me as I owned one - a few good presets I fatally overused came right back to haunt me. It was always a synth that had some nice qualities but somehow disappointed me. The JD990 - ten points for me as I spotted the preset made famous in Faithless' Insomnia (after a reverb tweak) called Pizza Hutt, but otherwise nothing terribly exciting either. The D50 is surely made redundant by the actual D 50 - I know there's an argument that this will be lighter on CPU but c'mon. They sound very close but comparing Fantasia patches (yes, yet again) there's a distinctive sweetness and richness to the virtual real thing as compared to the sampled version, which by comparison is almost grating in the highs and lacks just a little something in the lows. Larry, that's the distinctive D-50 real thing sound I was talking about - side by side you can hear the difference. Anyway, that makes 1987 doubly redundant.

Then I tried the steel guitar - horrible - and vol 1 of the orchestra. Folks, at the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, we've come a long way since this first came out. Again, its here for nostalgia mostly, but I guess there's a case to made for its use in non-orchestral stuff, where realism isn't the thing and just a particular timbre is handy in an RnB track or whatever.

All these patches play in the Concerto host. If all these expansions counted as one best-of sampled compilation it might have some merit to keep in a post-Cloud world, but as it is it's really only of use for very particular presets of yesteryear.

[Guy Rowland]

...and another session, focusing on the SRX keyboards and orchestra expansions. The keyboards I must confess seemed very good. It's set up like a Workstation in terms of its patches and breadth, but a way better than your average one, and a big range in every area, over 300 patches in total. I kept stopping to play around - the quality of those patches was excellent, and stood up to the best of my soft synths for the synth patches (I don't know if this is still Persing's era, but it feels like it might be). Further, its a proper synth that has 4 layers, with "waveforms" which seem more like short samples (?). CPU seems pretty modest. This seemed a far better product than any of their sampled range, and has a real appeal - though as we all know given everything else out there, how much an all-rounder has much appeal in this day and age, albeit a very good one, is debatable.

The orchestra was surprisingly fun. No, it's not going to win any realism awards, but the programming was a hoot - this big tutti patches with tricks like Swarzando where you hold the key for the initial hit, wait for it to build then get a big rumph on key release. A lot of that very playable sort of thing - again, not for serious orchestral use but could find a place in other genres. It has the basics and some esoteric instruments, some of which work far better than they have any right to - the clarinet was surprisingly good, while the oboe wretched for example.

[Luciano Storti]

You keep up these updates Guy, and I may just have to sign up...

Seriously, thanks for reporting back.

[Guy Rowland]

It's kinda crack for old synth bores, Luke. I think the year's sub - which I still haven't pressed GO on but almost certainly will - will likely be enough to get it out of my system, by and large - in general modern tools are broadly conceptually better for DAW work in the heat of battle. I can see then offering all sorts of inducements over time to lure people back onto the program, deals like this one. It feels to me like $100 per synth-to-keep is the minimum level that they can get away with.

But maybe they'll do just fine as they are. Each month they put something new there, and speaking of which SRX Dance Trax appeared overnight. This one was a formal collaboration between Roland and Spectrasonics, which feels now like a brief period of the old world meeting the new. Its a collection of over 300 patches of drums, basses, leads, loops and effects skewed towards year 2000 era dance. Some of the hits and loops feel very familiar - I can' t be 100% sure but I think some also crop up in Stylus RMX (indeed, its sobering to realise this is how far back the Stylus RMX core library is, this stuff is by and large 2 decades old). It certainly sounds like they do, they feel of a piece. There's kit sets for the 808, 909, 606 and 707 and a plethora of misc stuff. I don't think its quite as solid and uniformly good collection as Keyboards but some nice stuff in there. BTW, I belatedly discovered that you can at least search by category of these SRXs, which makes life a lot easier than the usual dumb patch list - it subdivides into bright pad, soft pad etc too. You can't help wishing they'd wrap all these expansions into the one unified synth, the logical extension of where the SRX concept heads I'd argue.

What is impressive is the quality of the stuff they seem to be churning out so fast. At least for the digital ones they're using the same code at its core as before I guess, but its still an awful lot of work, and Cloud Manager graphics issues aside it all seems very solid too. There's serious money gone into this.

[wst3]

I'm still on the fence.

I LOVE synthesizers. But the reality is I get almost no work that requires them, and that includes the pro-bono projects - so either I, or my cohorts lack imagination, or it is just luck of the draw, and could change at any time.

And I do love certain Roland Synths, the MK-80/Super Jupiter, the JX-3P, and the D-50 spring to mind as synthesizers I used a lot, I still have the MK-80. The JX-3P and D-50 sounds are somewhat dated, or at least associated with a certain era when synthesizers displaced guitars in pop music. Still quite handy, but I kept my ESQ-m to cover those sorts of sounds. Not the same, but the same era.

So far the two I'd keep are the Super Jupiter and maybe the Model 100? Or R-Mix - which used to be included with Sonar, and really was a very useful tool.

Just not sure. Frankly $200 for a software Super Jupiter might be enough of a reason, throw in the D-50 and it's down to $100?

Will Arturia ever expand on their Roland models? I love the Jupiter-8, but it is not a Super Jupiter or a D-50!

I could do the 30 day demo I guess, but do I want to change my mind? (am I a champion fence sitter or what?)

On the other hand that OT sale at NI is really pulling me. I picked up ARK 1 a while ago now, and I really like the sound, and the workflow. I picked up Time Macro recently and it compliments ARK 1 but does not fill in the blanks. I think ARK 2 would expand the utility of ARK 1 a lot. Not so sure about ARK 3 (and not jumping in on another pre-release deal, there are limits, so ARK 4 will have to wait.)

Interestingly, I've found that ARK 1 and the Symphobias play very nicely together. Especially the wood winds. Adding either Cinematic Strings (any of them, but especially CS2) or 8Dio Adagio/Agitato can work really well, the later requiring quite a bit more work, but sometimes that's just what's needed. I also picked up the 8Dio Claire winds in the most recent sale, and so far they seem to blend nicely with everything.

So I probably don't NEED ARK 2, but it'll never be this inexpensive again, or at least not for a very long time. What's a library addict to do?

[Lawrence]

My backup portable MIDI keyboard is an XP-30 with two expansion boards. I’ve pulled it out twice in the last three years. This is probably not for me.

[Guy Rowland]

I'm suddenly wavering on the subscribe button. See if anyone thinks my logic has any merit...

In the small print on getting these 2 plugins for life, Roland say:

This is NOT a permanent license to a title currently available in Roland Cloud’s catalog. This is continuous play access to selected instruments. All policies, mechanisms, updates, login, and maintenance requirements stay in effect. Roland Cloud reserves the right to review its catalog selections at any time and does not guarantee your selected titles will remain active in perpetuity.

This I knew. But then I got to thinking - hmm. I don't like subs in part because I always want full access to old projects, so getting 2 for £200 is appealing. The last sentence I initially brushed off as a bit of legal covering themselves, but then I figured that for all I know they will stop completely, or might withdraw a particular product for some reason or other, so really even the permanent ones I'd be well advised to render those to audio once done. And THEN I thought... hold on a minute, how is that different to having it on subscription anyway?!

Given that these are all lovely but pretty much come in the "nice to have" not "must have" bracket, it might well make more sense to have it all installed ready to go, but only pay for a month if I ever need anything and render the results to audio. Done. At $20 for a month, that's pretty reasonable. As for the Roland Cloud manager, I just uncheck Start With Windows and the Notifications panel, and it'll sit there in the background doing nothing, so no dramas there.

This is the answer to Larry's last post actually. If you really need it once every year, just pay the twenty bucks when you need it.

[The Saxer]

I LOVE synthesizers. But the reality is I get almost no work that requires them, and that includes the pro-bono projects

Haha, exactly the same here. I have tons of soft synths... mainly bought years ago and simply followed the updates. But when it comes to work I'm always the orchestra guy or brass writer. From time to time I do playback production for live singers, this are the only jobs where I use synth sounds when needed... but even then it's often easier to load a sampled pad to get things done fast.
But I got the Roland SE-02 and Novation PEAK hardware synths which both are on the hardware connection list of Omnisphere 2.5 - really fun to edit Omnis sounds on the fly using the hardware knobs and sliders. It simply works. From there it's hard to go back to mouse dialing knobs... it feels like eating soup while holding the spoon with Chinese chop sticks. And as tempting as this Roland cloud offer is... I know I'll rarely have use for it.

[wst3]

I'm suddenly wavering on the subscribe button. See if anyone thinks my logic has any merit...

In the small print on getting these 2 plugins for life, Roland say: <snip>

Given that these are all lovely but pretty much come in the "nice to have" not "must have" bracket, it might well make more sense to have it all installed ready to go, but only pay for a month if I ever need anything and render the results to audio. Done. At $20 for a month, that's pretty reasonable. As for the Roland Cloud manager, I just uncheck Start With Windows and the Notifications panel, and it'll sit there in the background doing nothing, so no dramas there.

This is the answer to Larry's last post actually. If you really need it once every year, just pay the twenty bucks when you need it.

BINGO! Now I think I will try the demo period to see how good the Super Jupiter really is. And when I need it I can rent it. Or just go back to using the hardware???

Thanks Guy!

[Guy Rowland]

Good heavens this is incredibly impressive from a hardware JV 1080 that someone posted on KVR. Extraordinarily close to the original. Must have been a helluva lot of work.