Tracey - I've done the exact thing, bringing manuals and documents I downloaded from Roland to work with me, and spending my lunch hours with them. A musician's work is never done, eh?

dnarkosis - I'm a professional drummer, and after 25 years of fulltime touring, gigging, and recording, I've put music on a back burner and got a "haircut and a real job."

I started writing several years ago, and found Roland workstations to be a wonderful tool for people like me. I understand music theory (thanks to an expensive but otherwise useless college degree in music), but don't play any melodic instrument well enough to gig on it. The workstation allows me to program the stuff I hear in my head, at my own speed. It's a godsend!

Songs that I wrote on my Roland have been recorded by a South Florida group called Sha-Shaty, on a very hard-to-find CD called Voices in My Head, and have been performed live with the Clarence Clemons band, with whom I played drums for the last 4 years.

It's a great tool for writing instrumental music, which the above songs are. I also write songs for vocalists, and one of my new years resolutions is to get around to recording them. I play with a local original band called Thursday's Child, and will probably use my XP to augment a demo we're recording as a followup to our debut CD.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004XSGB/

How 'bout you? What's the scoop on this board's "Resident Roland Rocket Scientist"?

-Keith