Roland FA (Part 2): A Few Tone Tricks
Practical Guide for the Roland FA 06, 07, or 08 Keyboard
Tricks to Choose and Modify Tones in a Studio Set
As I confessed in Part 1 of this series, I could make very little sense of the FA keyboard’s help manuals and so was delighted to find video tutorials presented by Ed Diaz on YouTube. Continued searching took me to a few other presenters as well, but their demonstrations were unnecessarily long with only one or two nuggets to glean. Those bits are included here, along with a couple of tricks I have discovered myself. Most of what follows, however, comes from Ed’s link below.
Choosing Tones for a Studio Set
If you’re just turning on your keyboard, you’ll need to get into the Studio Set program and pick one of those to fool around with. Here’s a brief reminder of that process:
Press Split and Dual both at once to bring up Studio Sets.
Go to PRST with the cursor, and then dial to USER.
Call up any completed Studio Set, or create one now (REVIEW):
USER 001 INIT STUDIO (or any unused spot)
Press Split + Dual again
0001 Full Grand appears in all 16 Part boxes. (Only 4 at a time show on the screen.)
Cursor down through the Parts and change the “Full Grand” to any tone you want, but you should leave Parts 10 and 16 alone for now. (Part 10 is your drum set if you want to use rhythm, and Part 16 has samples.)
Save your Studio Set as follows: Press the black WRITE button; press the red button under the screen (#2) that points to “Studio Set” on the screen; press “Rename” which is again #2; use the dial to find the letters for the name of your set, the arrow button to move forwards (or backwards) to the next letter, and the “insert” red button to leave a blank; press the button for the yellow OK on screen (#7); press button for “write” on screen (again #7); verify you are sure (#6).
You can even pull up a preset (PRST instead of USER) and practice modifying and choosing tones on that. The PRST section of the Studio Sets won’t allow you to write over them, but if you create something that you want to keep, go ahead and press WRITE. The preset “source” that you’re currently in will show, as will a “destination” USER box having the same 3-digit number as the preset. You can keep that number for reference or move the USER destination to a different number with the dial. Then proceed to rename and save as usual.
Another way to view the tones
After picking a tone category (e.g. “brass”), rather than seeing one tone name at a time when you scroll the dial, you can press Enter and see the whole list of tones on the screen, or as much as will fit there. Then you can use the cursor or the wheel to scroll through. Stop on the one you want, press Enter, and the screen returns to the Part boxes.
Changes to tones you can store in a Studio Set
I’ve now experimented with changing these several parameters of a tone: volume, simultaneous play, arpeggio, pan, pitch, and split point.
Volume: This is probably the most often-used change to a tone and the easiest to make. It surprised me to learn that 100 is not the top volume – you can go up to 127! All the tones are preset at volume 100, but they are not all the same loudness, so if you transition from one tone to another during a performance, it pays to calibrate their volumes in relation to each other ahead of time, so you don’t have to fool around with the volume knob while playing.
The most straightforward way to change the volume of a tone is to go right from the Part box. The number for the “Level” (volume) is just to the right of the tone name. Use the arrow key to cursor over and highlight the number, and then use the dial to change it.
Simultaneous tones: To make two or more sounds always play together, move the highlight to KBD, just to the right of Level, and use the dial or the INC/DEC (increase/decrease) buttons to toggle its yellow light on. All tones with the KBD light on will sound at the same time. That is to say, when you highlight one of them to play, you’ll hear all the other KBD-lit tones, too. A practical way to calibrate volume when two or more tones are linked is to set all but your main tone to zero, and then add in each of the others to your liking.
Arpeggio: Just to the right of KBD is ARP, associated with the black Arpeggio button on the right side of the dashboard. There is much to learn about adjusting arpeggios, but one thing I’ve discovered is that while in a Studio Set, the black Arpeggio button will not work on the tones unless you toggle the ARP on. The nice thing is that it will only affect the sounds you want it to, even when they have been linked to play simultaneously by the KBD button. For instance, you could have strings and harp playing together, but only activate the ARP for the harp, so the strings remain sustained.
Pan: You access Pan through the Part View screen. To get there, hold the shift button and press the red-light button that points to Part View on the screen. With the up arrow, cursor to the top band of parameters above all the tone names, beginning with “Level/Pan”. This is another way to change volume, kind of nice because you can see 8 tones at once with their volumes in easy sight. To Pan the tone from center to right or left speaker, cursor over to the 0 and then dial right or left. The line graph displayed between Level and Pan will indicate how far to the right or left the sound will be. When setting up instruments for a recording, you could imagine where your pieces would be on a stage – just off center or farther in each direction – the main instruments being more centered. If you listen with earphones, you’ll see that some of the tones have an intricate pan already built in, and might be best left at 0.
Reset octaves: Still in Part View (see Pan above), use the arrow button to continue right. You can move along the tone you’ve been changing or cursor back up to the info bar above the names. Go past Keyboard, Output/EFC, EQ, and stop at Pitch. Then use the dial or INC/DEC to change the pitch up or down by octaves. The next column is for half-step pitch adjustment, and the next is for cents, the tiniest adjustment you can make. When you’re finished, press either the black or the red Exit button.
Dual and Split Buttons Used Separately
As mentioned in Part 1, “Studio Sets for Easy Access,” if you press either the Dual or the Split button while in a studio set, the first two Parts will respond – that is, the tones you have in the first two Part boxes will play simultaneously when you press Dual, and will play on separate halves of the keyboard when you press Split. This is true even if you’ve used the KBD toggle to set up either of those tones to play simultaneously with any of the other Parts; those other Parts will not play when you press Dual or Split.
In both the Dual and the Split screens, you have another opportunity to change the volume levels. These levels remain in place when you go back to the full range Studio Set.
What does not remain in place are the splits. (Setting up splits between Parts in a Studio Set will be explained in Part 3 of this series.) Even if you have set up either of those first two tones to play on only part of the keyboard, when you are in Dual mode the tones go back to sounding on all the keys; and when you are in Split mode you can make a completely different split on that screen, which first appears at middle C (C-4). To set it where you want it, highlight the triangle containing C-4, and dial up or down to where you want the split between those two sounds to be. This will not affect any other splits you have made. So, if different songs you’re playing require two different split points between the tones in Part 1 and Part 2, you could set it up one way in the full Studio Set and then set up the same two Parts with a different split point in Split mode. (Remember, Split and Dual only affect Parts 1 and 2.)
Always make sure to save your changes by using the WRITE button. The safest thing to do is to WRITE every time you decide on a change. FYI, whichever Part box is highlighted when you press WRITE for the final time is the Part that will be highlighted when you reopen that Studio Set. I like to make sure the most universal tone or the one that will probably kick off my play list is the highlighted tone.
Recommended Tutorial
Ed Diaz of the Roland company will probably never know about this blog, but I must nonetheless credit him for his invaluable instructional videos. A lot of the preceding can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9t4XCp5P8
Warning: he goes fast! Keep close to the pause button!