Roland D-50
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Roland D50 is a polyphonic 61-key synthesizer by Roland. It was released in 1987 to compete with the Yamaha DX7. The D-50 has become a user favorite over the years, and is hailed as being easier to use and producing better sound than the DX7. Some of its features include basic onboard reverb and chorus effects, an innovative joystick for data manipulation, and an intuitive layout design. The external Roland PG-1000 Programmer could also be attached to the D-50 for better and more complex control over sound manipulations. The D-50 was also produced as a rack-mount unit called the D-550. Programming was not trivial however, with nearly 450 user-adjustable parameters. The D-50 could be modified through the addition of a 3rd-party product (the Musitronics M-EX) to make it multitimbral.
One instrument or "patch" on the D-50 consists of an upper and a lower part, both fully featured, which gave the synth a very rich and versatile sound.
The D-50 was the first synthesizer to combine sample playback with digital synthesis, a process that Roland called Linear Arithmetic synthesis. The engineers at Roland determined the most difficult component of a realistic instrument to simulate is the attack, so the D-50 included almost 100 sampled attacks in ROM. The synthesizer played back an attack and used the synthesizer section to create the sustain of the sound. This dual-use method was required in 1987 since RAM was so expensive. Roland did, however, incorporate a number of "texture" samples that could be mixed into the synthesized sustain-part of a patch. These sustain samples gave many D-50 patches an "airy" quality, particularly with its heavy use of choir, wind and string samples.
The D-50 was the first non-sampler machine to be able to produce sounds with these sample-based characteristics, but it was not long before every synthesizer on the market used a similar method to create sounds. Roland soon released a series of lower-priced keyboards and modules that allowed musicians who couldn't afford the big-ticket flagship D-50 some of those famous sounds (Roland D-10, D-20, D-5,MT-32).
The D-50's synthesizer-on-top-of-samples-and-through-effects innovation was also an obvious influence on the best selling digital keyboard of all time, 1988's Korg M1. In fact, this scheme was the primary method of digital keyboard sound creation for more than a decade, until ROM and Flash RAM were finally inexpensive enough to store entire samples or multisamples.
The presets of the D-50 were, typical for Roland, extremely good, and nearly every one of them can be heard on commercial albums of the late 80s. The D-50's factory presets have enjoyed a long legacy, as patches like "Digital Native Dance" and "Living Calliope" are so common they border on cliche. Some other D-50 presets live on in every machine that conforms to the General MIDI specification, including "Soundtrack" and "Atmosphere".
The D-50 entered the market again in 2004 as the VC-1 expansion card for Roland's V-Synth keyboard and VariOS rackmount synth. The VC-1 is no mere emulation — it is the D-50 operating system, with all the pros and cons of the old version. One can either use the improved DACs to get a cleaner sound or strip back to the "classic" sound; 28 additional waveforms are provided beyond the ones that were on the D-50, along with all the patches from the D-50 and all 4 Roland expansion cards.
Perhaps the most famous use of the Roland D-50 is in Jean Michel Jarre's Revolutions album, in which the majority of the album was recorded using one, with many of its original settings.
The D-50's pizzicato-preset is well known for being featured prominently in the song Orinoco Flow by Enya.
In the 2007 movie Music and Lyrics, the fictional band PoP! featuring Hugh Grant and Scott Porter use a Roland D-50 keyboard in their hit music video for Pop! Goes My Heart. The music video is said to be made in 1984, although the D-50 was not made until 1987.
