I find the easiest way to remember stuff from the manual (as I get older myself!) is to concentrate on one thing at a time, but to actually DO whatever it is I’m reading...

Somehow, my mind will absorb it by the old ‘monkey see, monkey do’ process, but if I just read about something and don’t immediately do what I’m reading, it’s gone down the black hole of my mind!

Roland have never really done tutorials... their manuals have rarely been instructional, more reference books. The index is your best friend! But there IS a certain logic to them, as long as you don’t try to grok the whole thing in one go.

Make sure you have ALL the manuals... there is a reference manual and a general one, if I remember rightly. Possibly a MIDI one too (anyone?).

Sadly, the main weakness in the EA7 IMHO, was that its two brand new, long requested features came with ZERO content. After years of waiting we finally got a sampler. With no content! And zero compatibility with any multisample format, including Roland’s own legacy S series format. What a blunder..! Sure, it was a measly 128MB in size (very 90’s!) but even so, there’s a ton of Akai, Roland and Kurzweil sample sets that fit quite nicely into 128MB of RAM. But can the EA7 read any of them? Hell no!

And after waiting YEARS for a multipad system, Roland provide just a tiny few MIDI ones, no audio loops, and no way to import MIDI to the multipads. It all seems to halfhearted. Finally the features their users had begged for for two decades, then basically they said ‘Here you go, make your own content!’ 🙄

I hate to say it, but arranger users are mostly into content being provided. Imagine if a Yamaha came with no multipad content, or nothing for the sampler... 😱

It’s so sad, to finally have what we’d been asking for for decades, and then slapped in the face with how little they did with it....