Why do most of the imaginative and innovative instruments seem to come from Japanese companies? Is it attitude, is it R&D, is it okay if Paul Colbert goes to the Roland head office in Japan to see how it's done?

"If you go to a classical concert, who enjoys it most? The conductor, because he controls it all."

"Why cannot we enjoy music like a conductor? That is the whim of Roland."

And that's the philosophy, not off a brochure, but straight from the horse's mouth: Mr Ikutaro Kakehashi, President of Roland, speaking (below) from his Hosoe factory in Hamamatsu, Japan. The connection between a classical conductor and a one megabyte sequencer powering multi-timbral Linear Arithmetic syntheses is not, perhaps, an immediately obvious one.

We — about a dozen British musical instrument journalists, that is — had been ferried to Japan to study the theory at close hand. How does a company, which started life importing Hammond Organs, end up after only 15 years battling it out at the forefront of digital instrument technology with other 100 year old firms boasting considerably more financial muscle. And in many cases, winning?

A set of initials frequently thrown around in our own columns is R&D — Research and Development. These days a hi-tech company's future stands or falls on the strength of its R&D staff, and their ability to come up with new ideas ahead of the crowd. Close to 30% of Roland's entire Japanese payroll is devoted to R&D. They're divided into Production Teams — 10 in all — and each one is in charge of the 'discovery' and execution of a single Roland music product.

One such team has been working on SALLY, Roland's self designed Sound Analysing software. Running on powerful NEC computers (far and away the most popular machine in Japanese business, by the way), it's been developing better samples, principally for Roland's series of sampled pianos. It dissects any sound, and displays it as a series of partials — a parade of spikes and dips that represent the sound's complete harmonic content. In this case, a flute. On the demonstration we saw, the computer then went on (with some human assistance) to identify certain of those partials as the background sound of the air conditioning unit in the room where the sample was taken.

Digital filters attuned to those partials then subtracted the 'sound' of the air conditioning unit from the 'sound' of the flute leaving just the flute without any of the damage to its tone that heavy EQ would have imposed in attempting the same job.

Apart from cleaning up samples, SALLY can improve on nature, identifying, say, the breath element in a flute and either lifting it in strength within that sample, or pulling it out altogether to be used elsewhere, say inserted in a guitar sample for the sound of a 'blown' guitar. Forefathers of the SALLY system produced many of the partials to be found on the D-50.

It still fails in some respects, however. The R&D department confessed that the best fuzzed, heavy metal guitar sound they've ever produced was not from any computer assisted system. They just fed a D-50 through a Boss Heavy Metal pedal.

Close questioning of any of Roland's R&D bods will elicit few clues to the immediate future, however. Yes, they guardedly reply, they are working on a totally new digital sound generation system that won't be ready for two years, but you'd have to have syrup for brains not to guess that everyone's doing that.

Where Roland test their new products is less of a puzzle to get into. The Hosoe factory — their largest and most recent — has a purpose built theatre/test room looking like a miniature Festival Hall... all comfy seats and wood panelled walls. The surprise is that the entire auditorium is built to be a physical reverb unit. Closer inspection of the panelling reveals that it's louvred, and can be opened by motorised remote control, like one vast, Venetian blind. With all the panels closed, the hall's reverb time is 1.79 seconds. Begin to open them up and sound reflections are absorbed in the material behind the walls, and the reverb time drops. The new time now shows in a headliner style LED display on the back wall. The 100 seats are constructed from a foam and covering meant to mimic the sound absorbency of a human frame. Therefore, no matter whether the hall is full or empty of bodies, the reverb and frequency response will be unspoiled.

Production takes place on several sites. In Hosoe the lines are given over to pianos and contemporary keyboards. We passed strange, gangling devices that squirted secret formula grease into the undersides of keyboard hinges, so the keys would have just the right give. Once a keyboard is on the line, it stays turned on, all the way up to being shuttled into multi-layered storage bays where it sits, plugged in, for 24 hours, waiting to go wrong. It rarely does.

Boss, the pedals division of Roland, concentrates its production in Osaka, probably Japan's second city if you discount the historic (and sightseeing) capital of Kyoto. Higher land prices mean separate factory sites scattered over a wider area, better suited to the smaller scale production of pedals.

While this hack of British journos was poking its collective ball point into the workings of Roland, they took the opportunity to pan our own brain cells. What did we think the British musician would like to see? On your behalf we suggested a cheap bass synth with some simple sequencing built-in; a portable, simple but powerful sequencer which you could write on while travelling or away from your gear; some pedals that went back to the original (and stronger sounding) delay with an LCD just for delay time so you could set echo rates up with confidence in advance of the next number; security codes built into synths so if anyone tried to steal your D-50, it wouldn't work for them; and a pitch shifting pedal which would remember the last note you played and use the memory to glide up or down to the one you're playing at the moment — a digital portamento unit which would turn your fretted bass into a fretless. How did we do?

One extra-factory investment which would suit the UK is the Roland Music School. Principally it's a centre where you can take courses in programming, software operation, and synthesis or elementary, advanced, jazz and pop lessons in actual playing. Roland's Tokyo school has been open for two years; courses there might be dear for British tastes — £40 to £50 a month for four hour sittings — but even with the stock market doing somersaults, the Yen still makes for a pricey conversion against the pound. The MT-32 multi-timbral synth and the PR-100 sequencer (piano recorder if you prefer) make for an impressive teaching tool. They can supply the entire orchestral/band/drum backing to a selection of popular pieces, available on Quick Disc while you add the lead lines. Unlike playing to tape recordings, the music can be slowed to any speed without dropping in pitch, certain sections can be marked and repeated/practiced in loops, while you can to some extent alter the arrangement by knocking out certain of the MT-32's instruments leaving room for your own left hand or solos. The problem in Britain, however, is more a philosophical one... the attitude of not really wanting to be taught. "That's something that happened to me in school, I don't do that now, thanks."

Like the man said, why cannot we enjoy music like a conductor? Roland are tipping effort and money in to taking digital synth technology to the musical education market. It's going to happen in Britain, one way or another, and it might actually be a lot more pleasant than we remember.