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Roland SC88 Sound CanvasArticle from The Mix, January 1995 |
Most powerful Canvas yet
Roland's SoundCanvas range have become a bit of a standard in the world of general MIDI, and the new SC88 is the grand-daddy of them all. Danny McAleer gets out his brushes and trys to paint a masterpiece...
There must be an EC mountain of surplus GM sound modules somewhere. They seem to pop in and out of popularity more often than Cliff Richard. And so to release another GM-compatible Sound Canvas seems a strange policy indeed. After all, the average studio nowadays boasts more canvasses than the Louvre. But before the new Roland SC88 is condemned to a draughty garret, doodling on pavements for tuppence a week, perhaps it is an idea to first examine what this sound module has to offer that's different.
It has a maximum polyphony of sixty-four notes, although this is reduced by some voices consisting of two partials. It also manages to offer 32 part multi-timbrality. This is achieved with two individual MIDI Ins, effectively turning the SC88 into two separate sound modules. There are actually three MIDI Ins, the third being a duplicate of MIDI In 'B', and located on the front rather than on the rear. Presumably, this is to make it easier to connect a MIDI source, because you can only select one or the other.
The rear panel has the other MIDI ports; two Ins and a software switchable Out/Thru, the audio sockets, plus a host computer adaptor. Unfortunately, a serial cable to connect to the Mac or PC is an optional extra, and isn't provided (unlike the hard-to-find MIDI cable and stereo RCA cables, of course — sarcasm doesn't become you, Danny — Ed).
The audio sockets are the RCA or 'phono' type, and a pair of inputs and outputs are provided. Having inputs isn't as interesting as you might first assume. Useful though they are (or could be), they are just a means of cascading the output of another sound source through to the outputs of the SC88, and not for actually mixing external sounds into the internal voices.
Perhaps it's just me, but having a 32 part multi-timbral sound module and then providing only two outputs is frustrating to say the least. The result is a lot of congestion at the audio sockets, with all channels fussing for space and beeping expletives at one another.
The front panel has a large variable contrast backlit LCD display, which happily displays enough information to be useful, a mini-jack headphone socket, a volume control, and a smattering of multi-function buttons. The volume control doubles up as an audition button, so you can preview a sound without the need for an external controller. Depressing the button triggers the currently selected sound (part one, MIDI A), which is certainly helpful in locating any possible problem, be it audio (if still no sound is made), or MIDI (if it makes a noise, but not when you press a key).
Operating the SC88 is straightforward for the most part. It becomes more complex when you start editing parameters other than the ones accessible from the main screen, when a series of esoteric double button-pushing and less obvious strategies are required. Pushing any of the buttons without accidentally squashing the whole panel requires a certain dexterity. What I do object to is having to push two buttons simultaneously. This often takes both hands, as the buttons are quite stiff, and for this reason important things like the manual, or more importantly the cup of tea, have to be put down.
Fortunately, the most frequently used parameters can be edited from dedicated buttons on the front panel, and all this is displayed clearly on the LCD screen. The current part is displayed at the top, with the voice number and title, while the reverb, chorus, level, pan, transpose (sharing a space with the delay), and MIDI channel values nestle beside the main bar-graph meters.
Pressing the 'All' button displays all thirty-two parts' activity bars, but any parameters you now edit are restricted to global. For example, pushing both 'Part' buttons down simultaneously accesses the effects editor, plus a few other global parameters such as the LCD contrast, the MIDI set up and tuning. There are eight types of reverbs including halls, plate, and room, all of which have editable parameters such as time, level, and feedback.
The same is true of the selection of delays and chorus settings. Each voice can then be assigned either none, or varying amounts of any of the three effects, which is quite useful. Also, all the effects parameters are controllable via MIDI. And the SC88 has a simple built-in EQ, which offers low and high frequency cut and boost, at a switchable 200/400Hz and 3/6KHz respectively.
The most bizarre function on the SC88 must be the ability to draw pictures. Perhaps it isn't as odd, considering it is after all a canvas (albeit a 'sound' one), and it does provide a neat way of labelling songs. You can dump these pictures via MIDI to recall whenever you play back a sequence too.
"...adding a bucket load of vibrato makes the instrument sound like a dalek gargling mouthwash after a late night bender"
The SC88 has the whole batch of SC55 sounds, as well as a vast array of its own. Because it is GM-specific, the sound setup is necessarily predictable, although there is a function whereby you can select a variation on the patch. Depending on which voice it is, there are between one and eight alternative sounds, the latter being one of the sound effects patches. Quite often, the variations are far better than the presets.
There are some memorably good sounds, as well as some very forgettable ones. Amongst the cream of the crowd is santur; a sort of less obtrusive sitar-type twang; the cleverly titled and cheesy sounding organ 2; and the Taiko drum which sounds excellent if you try to play a melody with it. As ever, the brass sounds are not incredibly impressive and tend to resemble a wailing freight train, rather than their desired tones, and the solo strings sounds (violin and cello) all rather unconvincingly, too. Despite the odd clanger, though, the overall quality of the sounds is impressive, and it doesn't take too much effort to massage them into a piece of music.
When the original GM specification was initially drafted, everyone must have either run out of ideas when they got to patch number 120, or taken complete leave of their senses and decided that everyone was going to need telephones and helicopters in their music. Whether it was a good idea isn't really important now, and having just scuffled through the sound effects patches and all their variations. I remain impartial. It seems as though they could all be better employed as part of a drum kit, but they are good, too.
The best noises are the digital telephone, train, and siren which are all perhaps quite useless in the context of a normal piece of music, but good fun nevertheless.
The SC88 hasn't really been designed as a synthesiser, and so for this reason can be a little frustrating if you need to be a bit more creative than this particular canvas allows. The parameters that are available for tweaking are vibrato (rate, depth, and delay), a filter, resonance, and a three stage (attack, decay, and release) amplitude envelope.
The vibrato is fixed rate unfortunately, and is only therefore useful for adding the tiniest of warblings to an acoustic instrument, making the sound a bit more dynamic. Or by contrast, adding a bucket load of vibrato makes the instrument sound like a dalek gargling mouthwash after a late night bender. The filter sounds very good, but again isn't variable, and so you miss out on some fantastic sweeping timbres unless you take the time and effort to program it via a string of continuous system-exclusive messages (cue crashing computers).
One of the best parameters on the SC88, which is inherent to all of Roland's sound machines, is the resonance. Adding a touch of this to any of the synth sounds, especially the basses, gives the patch an instant analogue-ness that's hard to emulate on any other synth.
There can be no denying the usefulness of the GM standard; neither can there be any avoiding it. The SC88 has a lot to offer the quickfix musician looking for an extensive palette of sounds and impressive percussion kit all in one box, and has just as much appeal to a Mac or PC owner looking for an extra (or indeed their first) set of MIDI channels. But it does rather seem that the canvas supplied here has already been scribbled on by someone else. They're very nice scribbles; just not yours. There are more flexible synth modules on the market, but few with so formidable an arsenal of sounds.
Sounds: | 32 Part Multi-timbral 64 Note Polyphony 654 preset sounds and 24 drum kits 256 user sounds and 2 user drum kits |
Audio Connections: | 1 pair stereo outputs (RCA connectors) 1 pair stereo inputs (RCA connectors) with volume control |
MIDI connectors: | 1 MIDI Out/Thru, 3x MIDI In (MIDI In A, MIDI In Bx2) |
Dimensions: | 218 (w) x 250 (d) x 72 (h)mm |
Control Room
Gear in this article:
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Re:Mix #7 Tracklisting:
24 Roland SC88 Sound Canvas tune 25 Roland SC88 samples
This disk has been archived in full and disk images and further downloads are available at Archive.org - Re:Mix #7.
Review by Danny McAleer
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