Roland FA (Part 4): Advanced Keyboard Switch Groups
Practical Guide for the Roland FA 06, 07, or 08 Keyboard
Advanced Keyboard Switch Groups
Why You Want to Use This Feature
Depending on your age, energy, or personality, “Advanced” may fill you with curiosity, excitement, or trepidation. Have no fear! If you like layering sounds, you will want to learn this!
This is the fourth installation of the series, Practical Guide for the Roland FA. In the second one, A Few Tone Tricks, we learned how toggling the KBD light on would cause all of those tones to play simultaneously; and in the third one, Advanced Layers and Splits, we learned how to combine a bunch of tones with the KBD light, and then relegate them to different registers on the keyboard using split points. But what if you have a Studio Set loaded with cool sounds, and would like to layer two of them here, three different ones there, and one of those mixed with a couple others somewhere else? You do it with Pad #8: KBD SW GROUP.
As before, I’m basing this information on the instructions offered by Ed Diaz of the Roland company, whose videos are leading me forward into the complexities of this wonderful synthesizer. Included here are links to his two-part tutorial.
PART ONE:
Setting Up a Keyboard Switch Group
Roland FA-06/07/08 - How to setup a Keyboard Switch Group - YouTube
Ed advises at the outset that you must have version 2.0 or higher operating system to be able to perform these tricks. He explains the advantage of using a Keyboard Switch Group: If you need several layers and splits within the same song, you can’t switch to different studio sets to reach them. Instead, use this feature to set multiple layers and splits within the same studio set.
As always, when watching Ed work, you find out more tricks along the way. The first thing he does here is put tones into the Sound Set; and when he gets to strings “goes inside” by pressing Enter to show the list of string options. Press Enter again to return to the Part boxes.
To activate the Keyboard Switch Group:
1. Press Pad Utility (button to the left of the 16 big pads).
2. Press Pad Mode (button under screen).
3. Press (big) Pad #8: “KBD SW GROUP” (Keyboard Switch Group)
4. Press the Pad Utility again
Now you’ll see two changes: First, the large pads have transformed from pink to green, and all your sounds can be accessed by pressing them. Part 1 is on Pad 1, which is the bottom left. Part 2 is on the next pad to the right and so forth, with Part/Pad 16 at top right.
The second transformation occurs when you press the Pad Utility the second time: the screen now shows the 16 spots where the pads are, arranged in a grid of four down and four across, so you can see them all at the same time. However, instead of the names of the tones that are in each part, each spot contains a “Group” number and a miniature version of that very same 4x4 grid. The Group number corresponds to the Part/Pad number. On the mini-grid, 15 spots are grayed out. The one that is lighted is in the spot that corresponds to the overall grid – so the mini-grid in Group 1 has its #1 spot lighted, and the mini-grid in Group 5 has the #5 spot lighted, et cetera.
So which tone would you like to add more sounds to? Let’s say you want to layer up the tone you’ve placed in Part #7.
1. Press large Pad #7. A blue highlight will encircle Group 7 on the screen.
2. Press the button under the screen for EDIT. (Button #2.) Now the screen magnifies the mini-grid of Group 7. Each Part is numbered, and instead of a green light showing where the sound is, the word ON tells you that tone is what you’ll hear when you play. You can press any number of other pads while in EDIT mode, and those tones will be added to the Group, their OFF indicator, switching to ON, and the sounds all layering up. If you change your mind, just press the Pad again, and the ON switches back OFF.
3. When finished, press EXIT. The mini-grids all show up again, but now Group 7 will have the additional lights from the Parts that you have added to that Group.
4. Continue by pressing the next large Pad you want to add a sound to; EDIT, add tones, EXIT.
5. If you want to keep these changes, you must SAVE using WRITE STUDIO SET (explained in blogs 1 and 2.)
Another interesting feature is that you can turn off the original tone from the Studio Set if you’d like to. Say you only wanted to work with a few sounds and didn’t fill in all the Parts when you constructed the Set, and #8 is still Full Grand. When you choose Group 8 (by pressing large pad #8) and go into EDIT mode, pressing pad #8 again will toggle the original sound off. Then you can use Group 8 like a clean palette to mix tones from other Parts.
Ed uses this feature slightly differently. He combines his two solo tones, Parts 5 and 6, in Group 5. Then in Group 6, he toggles off the solo and puts Parts 3 and 4 in there. Even though the tone he placed in Part 6 will be OFF when he hits Pad 6, it will still play in combination with the tone in Part 5 when he hits Pad 5. Thus, each Group can use whatever combination of sounds you desire from any Part box in the Studio Set.
When you exit the Keyboard Switch Group mode, returning to the list of Parts, you will see that the keyboards of all your layered sounds light up when you press any large Pad that has a combination.
Here’s what I think is the coolest feature of layering tones using the Keyboard Switch Group: connecting the sounds only goes in one direction. We learned before how to layer sounds by turning on the yellow KBD light in various Part boxes, but if you use that method to connect Part #5 with Part #9, they will always play together whether you press Pad 5 or Pad 9. With Advanced layering, you can add #5 to #9 to hear both when you press Pad 9, but Pad 5 remains unaffected. You can also add Part #4 to Part #5, but #4 will not then transfer to #9. See what I mean? There’s so much more room for creative mixing!
PART TWO
Splitting Layers
Roland FA-06/07/08 - Advanced Keyboard Switch Group - YouTube
This tutorial is about making adjustments to your layered tones, with an emphasis on creating splits.
Ed begins by quickly filling a Studio Set with four tones. Like lightning, he sets up the Keyboard Switch Group, which shows just how fast you can get when you start doing this a lot! The tones are similar to those in Part One, but he has grouped them differently for this tutorial.
He then shows how to adjust the volumes “as if you were playing live.” He leaves the Group screen by pressing Exit, so that the Part boxes are all showing again. The yellow KBD lights will show you the parts that are active in that group. Using the cursor arrows, he visits each active tone and adjusts the volume using the knob (#6) instead of highlighting LEVEL and using the wheel. When you finish with one Group, press Pad Utility again and then a large Pad for another Group you want to adjust. Exit, and the Part boxes for that Group will be showing on the screen with their yellow KBD lights on and their mini-keyboards active. (You don’t have to go back into Group mode each time if you don’t want to – you can just press another large Pad and the yellow KBD lights will change over to that Group’s active parts.)
To show how to get a split involved, Ed finds a bass sound he plans to put in the lower register and adds that to the Studio Set in the fifth Part box. Since he is using an FA 06 with just 66 keys, he also lowers the octave of the bass by pressing Part View and then going into the Pitch section (explained fully in a previous blog, Roland FA, Part 2: A Few Tone Tricks.) Then, instead of adding the bass separately to one of the Groups, Ed just toggled on the yellow KBD light of Part box 5, and the bass joined all the other parts that were on. Until the split point is created, you hear the bass up and down the keys. To create the split quickly, he cursors to the mini-keyboard where letter names now show; he highlights the upper letter, presses Shift, and then plays a key where he wants the bass sound to stop. He likewise adjusts the other three tones changing their lower note to stop just above the last note of the bass. (More detail on this in the last blog instalment, Roland FA, Part 3: Advanced Layers and Splits.)
A word of caution: split points do not apply to just one Group, which makes sense really, because you set it up in the Part boxes. Therefore, if you want to use a piano that you’ve added to a Group with a bass, and have given it a split point to share with that bass, when you go back to any other Group containing the piano, the split point is intact, and the lower register will be silent – unless you add another tone to fill in the gap.
Ed does just that in the next few minutes of the video, using two different bass sounds to add to the Groups where he has subtracted the low register.
He then moves to Part 9 and starts to play with sounds to layer for soloing – even using Part 10, which is usually reserved for the drum kits. I know from experience that if you put a non-percussion sound in Part 10, you can’t use the auto-rhythm section. Notes will play instead of drumbeats!
To keep the scheme you come up with, make sure you name and save it (explained fully in the first instalment of this series, Roland FA, Studio Sets for Easy Access). Once you have saved a Keyboard Switch Group into a Studio Set, whenever you go back to that Set and press Pad Utility, the KBD SW GR will be what comes up automatically (until you change it to something different and save with WRITE.) The large Pads will start Green every time, and your layered scheme will be ready to roll!