Inside the V-Synth, part 1

You can find the full post on Sequence 15.

"Roots of the V-Synth

Considering that the V is a bit out in left field compared to most of Roland's other offerings over the last decade, the question can fairly be asked: where did this idea come from? The roots of it can be seen in the JD-800/990 offering from the early '90s. That was Roland's first serious attempt to design a digital synth that would be attractive to synth programmers and sound designers. However, at the time it was introduced, it did not sell well. Part of this was the timeframe in which it was introduced (the synth market had turned heavily to romplers at the time). However, the attempt at building a knob-per-parameter digital synth turned out to be intimidating to some customers, as well as making the unit physically large. And, in the end they still had to put the effects, MIDI, and system parameters in menus. It helped that the 800 had two displays which were fairly generous for their time, and the 990 had an even better multi-line text and graphics display (derived somewhat from the S-series of samplers). Despite the flaws, it was state-of-the-art for a digital synth user interface at the time."