wfs1234 wrote:I really don't get the recent Roland hate? They make a lot of garbage, yeah. But they also make/have made lots of really really cool things.
You kind of answered your own question---the perception is "they make a lot of garbage" and they "have made...cool things" (past-tense) ---A lot of Roland stuff just looks cheap---glossy plastic shell with plastic knobs. For many people synths should be metal and wood, not plastic. First impressions count for a lot, and some people see Roland and just associate cheap looks with inferior performance.
As far as the old guard (don't know how much of this applies to ILF), there's a lot of bitterness projected at Roland, because they haven't really done anything in 30 years for the synth community. Yes, they're still a productive business, but when you think about the love people have for stuff like the Juno-106, there's no modern equivalent. Twenty years from now, all the digital synths, that Roland produced in the 1990s-2010s are going to be in landfills. That's 30 years of dumpster plastic.
If you were a Roland apologist, you might even say they're a victim of their own success. People loved the Juno as a more economical alternative to the Prophet 5 and the modulars of the 70s. But not only has Roland failed to reissue their most-beloved items (the Juno-106 came out in 1984), they've just made sad tributes to them in the form of digital replicas. To me Roland's shot callers are just kind of pathetic. They've been going through the motions for years, just reissuing and repackaging their greatest hits over and over again. The Junos, TR-09 and TB-303 are all available as digital reissues, which some people just see as over-priced knock-offs.
---Korg would be in a similar boat, if not for Tatsuya Takahashi, who recently announced he was leaving HQ in Tokyo to take on an advisory role in Germany. Before Tats joined Korg, they hadn't done anything analog in about 25 years. That guy spearheaded a team that produced the Monotron, Minilogue, and the Volcas. Korg was just making digital workstations for film composers and studio owners. Hobbyists and basement experimenters weren't really making up much of their base.
Yamaha is kind of a quirky company. They did the Tenori-On (not necessarily the commercial success some were hoping for) which was welcomed by many as an innovative device. The Reface line was kind of a joke when it launched at $499, but now that people can score them for $300-350, there's definitely a certain degree of appreciation for them. Outside of the Tenori and the Reface series (both seen by some as quirky toys for tinkerers, rather than as sophisticated gear for elite pros), Yamaha has been relatively vanilla for the last 15-20 years as well.
All in all, I find the big 3 of Japan pretty disappointing. The 70s aren't coming back, so it's unlikely that we'll see all 3 producing analog polysynths simultaneously again, but it's not because they lack the resources. In Korg's case it came down to personnel. A couple of guys developed the Monotron, showed it to Korg leadership and years later we're still seeing Korg kind of reinventing/revitalizing itself. I'd love to see Roland and Yamaha reproduce some string synths or 6-voice analog synths, but after years of ignoring their customers' requests, it's kind of hard to remain optimistic.
If you look at what Moog did with the Sub 37, many of its features were a direct response to customer feedback. It was very different for a Moog---much more aggressive and gritty. If you look at what Dave Smith has done since getting back into the synth game, he's also done innovative stuff---adding SHARC-based effects to his 6-voice analog synths (OB-6 & P~6), without infringing on the analog integrity of the overall sound. The Rev2 is going to be able to combine a sequencer with an arpeggiator on separate voice banks---I don't know of any other synth that can do that---let alone across 16 voices for two-grand.
Back to Roland/Boss, I think it's an older style corporation that's just a bit vanilla and a bit bloated-----they aren't grooming innovators or looking to fast-track their sharpest thinkers. They just stick to a formulaic, status-quo mentality way too often. They have the budget, the engineers, and the work force to make better gear, but they just keep churning out more plastic groove boxes and underwhelming keyboards year after year.
