ROLAND E80 REVIEW

The Roland E80 arrived very well packaged inside the box with plenty of padding and the first impressions after taking this out were that it had an ultra modern and sleek design. The E80 was actually designed by a professional design company in Italy, especially for Roland and they certainly went to town with the design pulling out all of the stops.
It is fairly heavy compared to other arrangers on the market, but it is still easy enough to carry about.
There are 61 standard length velocity sensitive keys with after touch and the E80 offers 128 notes of polyphony. There are also built in speakers with a bass reflex system and with these you can electronically change the speaker modelling, to one of many different types from the options on the display screen. Personally I find this feature a bit of a gimmick, as the internal speakers seem to output far too much treble for my liking. You can of course change the EQ settings, but the E80 really springs to life when you take the outputs into a PA system, or an external sound source.

LCD SCREEN

The colour touch screen on the E80 is superb and very responsive. You can clearly see everything that you want to edit or assign, changing voices or styles is done very quickly and the operating system is fairly easy to get into after a short learning curve. The manual is very well written and is generally helpful when you are stuck and need an answer.

VOICES

There are many new voices inside the E80 which make up a grand total of 1100. The natural piano sound is very good, there are some really nice electric piano sounds, there are plenty of new guitar sounds and the electric ones are fantastic, strings and woodwind give a very warm realistic sound, the brass section is good but to my ears not quite as good as those on the Tyros 2, choirs and synth sounds are superb, the organ drawbars are excellent and the inclusion of sliders for drawbars is a must for any arranger, it makes creating organ sounds so much easier. There are also 54 drum kits inside the E80 and these kits really do give you a live sound that some other arrangers seem to lack and then you have also got the guitar mode with a dedicated direct access button to take you there. This mode is great for playing around with and you can even use this to add phrases into the music styles.
I would recommend that any E80 owner gets used to the MFX button as this adds things like reverb, chorus and EQ to the voices. Some voices can sound a little thin at first and do not have that much sustain on them. Personally I prefer to have little sustain on the voices so you can edit the voice and add your own amount instead, then just save the voice back out again. I did have the G70 when it first came out and found that the sounds were covered in far too much reverb, but this has been corrected in an OS update.
Things like reverb can also be controlled by one of the drawbar sliders, so you can add as much or little as you want whilst playing live – another great feature.

STYLES

Moving onto the styles now and as with the sounds I find them far better than those inside the G70, although there are similarities in both arrangers, so its case of do you need 76 keys or the 61 as found in the E80?
There are more than 350 styles split into 12 families and the E80 has 50 brand new styles not found anywhere else which were created by international specialists.
The E80 also has 4 Main variations, 4 intro and endings, 6 fill ins, break mute on assign SW, fade in and out buttons and my favourite feature is a button for the on bass variation so you can turn this on and off at will. Why on earth didn’t Yamaha do this with the T2?
There are also 4 one touch settings for each style which are all customisable and the make up tools allow you to edit things like songs and styles.
The sound quality of these styles is very good and they are all very useable. Where the Tyros 2 gives you that great studio/CD recording quality, the E80 has a more natural live feel about it with plenty of bottom end and punch to the drum section – fantastic. Many styles give you an immediate indication of what to play e.g. Angel Ballad immediately tells you Angel by Robbie Williams. You can use up to three master effects on each style and you can individually change EQ for each styles part giving loads of flexibility.
There really is too much to talk about in the styles and sounds categories so all I can say is go and check the E80 out as soon as possible.

D BEAM

The D Beam is a great feature on the E80 and you can assign this to different features. You can move your hand over it to make the variation go up or down and you can assign sound effects to this etc. It is a very handy feature to have.

SRX EXPANSION

The E80 has 2 expansion slots, unlike the G70’s single slot. These SRX boards offer superb sounds which the E80 can see immediately after inserting one. There are currently 12 available offering something for everyone and then there is also the SR-G01 board which is very good value for money.

Another thing the E80 has is the built in Vocal Harmonising unit. This offers loads of different settings, vocoder, harmony effects and auto pitch correction – very handy.

There are the usual connection and outputs on the back including USB2 and a PCMCIA card slot. These cards are very fast at accessing data so you can easily save and load all of your settings.

Well I think that is enough to give you an idea what the E80 is about. It really is a top end arranger and for me it is the best Roland has come out with since the G1000. The E80 is competing with the likes of the Tyros 2 and in many ways it gives it a very good run for its money. Neither instrument is better than the other, both offer something totally different. If you like the feel of a live band as backing from the styles with plenty of oomph to it, then you will not go wrong with one of these machines.

I rate the E80 8/10

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[This message has been edited by Craig_UK (edited 05-13-2007).]