Roland have taken a good long while to get in to the sampling market, despite their obvious ability in the field as evidenced by the TR707 and TR505 drum machines and the RSD10 Sampling Delay. As we write, the S50, their professional sampler, is still some time away from delivery, and meanwhile the competition continue to clean up. It's astonishing that the established Japanese manufacturers, Roland and Yamaha, should allow upstart companies such as Akai and the capitalist round-eyes from Ensoniq, Sequential and E-Mu to take such a lead in the sampling stakes.

So any assessment of the S10 is bound to be coloured by comparisons with the established opposition — the Akai S612 (around £700 without a keyboard), the S900 (around £1,400, ditto), the Ensoniq Mirage (£1,200/£800 with or without keyboard), the Prophet 2000/2002 (around £2,100/£1,700 with or without keyboard), and even the E-Mu Emax (£2,000 with keyboard but you can't buy it yet) and the Akai VX3000 (around £1,200, ditto).

At £999 the S10 plonks itself firmly in the middle of this range, fractionally more versatile than Akai's S612 and including a keyboard for your added £250 or so, perhaps more straightforward to use than the Prophet, cheaper but less versatile.

Specs On?

But let's take a look at the basic specification of the S10. It's a very compact keyboard with just four octaves of full-sized keys, it loads from Quick Disks inserted into a right-hand drive slot (of which more in a moment) and offers 4.4 seconds of sampling which can be divided into four sections with loops. There's a single LCD display, a couple of handfuls of control buttons, and an Alpha Dial which calls up various options for each control function.

Overall, a neat and unfussy package. But what about those Quick Disks? Already familiar from Akai's S612 Sampler, the Quick Disk is a budget format which is not compatible with the 3.5" disks used by almost all the other samplers we've mentioned. You can fit just one sound per side on a QuickDisk, which in the case of long sounds means loading more than one disk to get the complete effect — and the things are pretty difficult to come by. They're manufactured by Sharp for a now outmoded range of computers, and won't be around forever. If you intend to go for an S10 and want to do a lot of your own sampling, try to find a local source of blank Quick Disks first, otherwise you may experience what we doctors call "severe sampling frustration".

At power-up the S10 flashes up 'Ready' and will then proceed to load any disk in the drive. Three pairs of disks are supplied; Combination (orchestral sounds), Strings and Chorus, and Drum Set (snare, bass, tom and hi hat). If part of a sound is on the second side of the disk, the S10 flashes up Change Disk, and if you want to fill the entire memory, you'll have to use two disks.

The S10's memory is divided into four 1.1 second samples referred to as A, B, C, and D, and the disk remembers which segment a sound has been saved from. This is handy, because you can use two or four segments together to create a longer (2.2s or 4.4s) sample; however, if you do load four separate samples instead, you can flip instantly from one to another by hitting the A, B, C or D buttons while playing.

New sounds will be available from Roland main dealers for just the cost of a blank disk, and the ones we heard were certainly impressive. There's an excellent throaty pipe (church) organ, a reasonable multi-sampled piano with only faintly audible split points, a selection of keyboard and wind instruments, and more. A complete library is being made up at the moment.

Various sample editing parameters to change the envelope, filtering and keyboard mode of the sounds are hidden away, and we'll come back to them later. First, a brief excursion into how to make your own samples on the S10.

Sampling

The answer is that it's not as easy as the Akai S612 or as comprehensively powerful as the Prophet, but falls comfortably somewhere in between the two. Just plug a mike or line input into the rear panel socket, hit Mode and select Auto or Manual trigger, adjust the Record level slider next to the performance controls for a good level on the LCD display, select a memory or memories, and shout. The S10 does the rest, going into an Auto Loop Search mode for a few seconds before getting ready to play.

On a simple input — we saw the trick being demonstrated with a harmonica — the loop search took a few seconds and resulted in the most breathtakingly silent loop imaginable. On a more complex sound such as a voice counting from one to 10, the S10 is likely to give up after a few seconds (you can switch smartly out of the Auto Loop Search mode if you like), in which case you can set a loop for yourself should you want one.

The Loop parameters, like all the other editing parameters, are accessed by hitting 'Wave; Parameter' and using the Forward/Backward buttons and Alpha Dial for editing. There follows, for completists, a list of all the major S10 parameters: impatient types can skip this bit, although they may get confused later on!

Editing

1) REC KEY; sets 'home' key for a new sample.

2) BANK TUNE; retunes a sample if required.

3) LOOP TUNE; changes the tuning of the loop if set.

4) SCAN MODE; makes the loop run forward, backward, or alternating (as on the Akai S612), which can help produce smoother looped sounds.

5) LOOP TYPE; Auto, Manual, or One Shot (no loop).

6) ST; start point of sample, expressed as a position out of 65535 bits and as a percentage of the total memory.

7) END; sample end point.

8) LP; loop length.

9/10) AEN/ALP Auto Loop Mode control (not implemented on early S10s).

11) KEY FOLLOW; can be switched off so every key gives the same pitch (sometimes useful for drum samples).

12) PITCH BEND; On or Off.

13) VIBRATO; On or Off.

14) ENV V-SENS; switches on velocity response of envelope.

15/21) ENV RATE/LEVEL 1-4; a programmable Alpha Juno-type envelope with velocity response.

22) DYN SENSE; degree of velocity sensitivity if switched on.

23/24) A-BEND RATE/DEPTH; speed and depth of auto bend which can be set to occur at the start of a note — good for brass, 'tape machine starting up' effects and so on.

So that's dealt with the sample parameters, but there is also a complete set of performance parameters covering vibrato speed and depth, modulation depth, vibrato delay, continuous or chromatic bend, arpeggiator speed, range (1-3 octaves), repeats, mode (up/down/random) and synchronisation (internally or from an audio pulse at the sample input, but not via MIDI), velocity threshold, velocity detune, delay parameters and trigger time.

A few points need explanation here. The S10 is velocity sensitive if you choose it to be, and you can switch between two samples according to velocity either smoothly (velocity mix) or abruptly (velocity switch). The former is good for subtle expression, the latter for effects such as alternating plucked and snapped bass guitar sounds; the velocity level at which the change occurs can be programmed.

Detuning can also be fixed or velocity-responsive, and you can also set up a single delayed repeat of all notes played up to around three seconds long, which adds useful echo effects; the tuning of the repeat can be offset from the original in semitones up to one octave.

In Play Mode, the main options available are Normal (one sound) or Dual (two layered sounds, simply obtained by pressing down any two of the A/B/C/D memory buttons), plus Velocity Mix or Switch, Detune and Delay. In performance you'll also be using the Master Volume slider and Bend Range slider, and the left-to-right Pitch Bender, which also doubles as the Modulation control with a slight forward pressure. Using this sort of performance control (first seen on the SH-101) is very much a matter of taste, but at least it puts everything in one hand.

Swapping

Let's suppose you've loaded a couple of sounds, set the pitch bend range and other parameters, and you're all ready to go — but you decide you don't want exactly these sounds. The S10 offers quite a lot of flexibility in terms of swapping memories around, without being overly complex.

Under 'Wave Modify' you'll find various sample editing functions which could come in very handy. You can use Combine to cut down the size of a sample by junking unwanted parts of a sound, and then use Mix to load the data from any two banks into a third, effectively giving yourself a dual sample for the price of one memory.

You can use Copy to move samples from one memory to another and Swap to exchange the positions of two sounds; you can Reverse a sound or add filtering. The S10's filtering is quite powerful — you have two high-pass and one low-pass filters with variable resonance to play with — but they're not actually dynamic, which is to say that they provide fixed filter effects rather than responding to the envelope for classic synthesizer twangs. The filters also take some time to come into effect due to the re-calculation of harmonics necessary.

Once you're happy both with your sounds and with their editing and positioning you can save them to disk. SAVE allows you to select a name using the Alpha Dial before disk storage; and if there's anything on the disk you're given its name before taking up the option to erase it.

If you hit LOAD the S10 will load all the data on the disk (telling you to flip the disk over if necessary) and if you hit LOAD/F1 it will give you the file name first. LOAD/F2 will load a new sound without altering the performance data, should you wish to continue using the current detune range, delay time and so on. Loading takes about three seconds per disk side.

MIDI & SPLITS

The MIDI implementation on the S10 is pretty good; if you hit the MIDI switch the Alpha Dial will allow you to select a channel, switch bender, hold modulation and program response via MIDI on or off, and switch Active Sensing on (so all notes are killed if the MIDI input goes dead).The Arpeggiator has only one front panel control, on/off, and as we mentioned, it can't be clocked via MIDI.

How about splits? The four samples available on the S10 can play on completely independent sections of the keyboard, although it doesn't appear that these can be controlled by different MIDI channels as on the Prophet 2000/2002. Hit F1 and Parameter to bring up the Split Display, which simply allows you to enter three note values for split points; set them using the Alpha Dial and you'll find that an entire split can be saved to disk and reloaded instantly.

It's also possible to go into EXT TRIG PLAY mode which assigns up to four keys to external note commands coming in via MIDI. What this means in practice is that a MIDI drum machine such as the TR707 or Drumtraks, which has its own ideas about keyboard assignment to drum sounds, can be made to work with the S10 so you can replace existing drum sounds with one, two, three or four S10 samples.

On the rear panel of the S10 you'll find the sampling input, a socket for the Hold (sustain) footswitch, MIDI sockets and so on. The S10 gives all the usual signs of high-class Roland construction, and has the advantage of being small and light; the four-octave keyboard may be a disadvantage (particularly when you're playing your Grand Piano solo) but at least it's crisp and responsive.

Conclusions

I really liked the S10, and almost wished I hadn't already bought a Prophet 2000. It's definitely a budget machine (although calling £999 'budget' is stretching a point a little) but has a lot of pro features, such as velocity sensitivity, good modulation options, multisplit (if only four ways as compared to the Prophet and Mirage's 16), LCD display and so on.

There are a couple of drawbacks, such as the short keyboard (which is only really inhibiting for piano pieces), the lack of synth filter effects and the Quick Disk loading method. But it's not so much the fact that you'll often have to load both sides of a disk, or even both sides of two disks, which is worrying (although it'll provide fun on stage); more the fact that Roland UK took weeks to find a source of blank Quick Disks, so what chance has the average punter?

Overall, though, a not-too-tentative thumbs-up for the S10. It's well-designed, reasonably priced, and should prove a very satisfying purchase.

Roland S10 Sampler - RRP: £999