I know it was discussed somewhere here before but is anyone using the Roland FP E50 ?. It looks pretty amazing, especially the price. The Style list is extensive and it has a real piano keyboard which I miss. I could sell everything and get that for what I do now which is just play at home.
Thoughts ?

I think the thing that ruled it out for me is that you can't use user styles, or styles from older Roland's. It's a closed ecosystem, and so far I haven't seen Roland do much towards adding more styles.

Compared to the BK9, it isn't even close. No VK section, no Key Audio, only a fraction of the sounds and a TINY style selection (about 170 total).

If you're content with just a few styles in any genre, it's got a lot going for it. Maybe even a throwback to early 90's style arrangers with few styles and no way to add more, and many of us look back fondly on the simplicity of those early days.

But simply adding a decent cheap 88 piano action controller to your BK9 might give you the best of both worlds and not leave you in a box, stylewise...

I may not be adding much here, I bought a Roland FP30 as primarily a piano, which I am learning to play. I love it for the sound and action. It has many other good sounding voices I seldom use as I have a studio full of arrangers. We are all looking for a particular set of features and this is mine.

Bernie

Hi Bill,

I have played on a Roland FP-E50 at our local Guitar Center. I agree that it is an all-in-one solution at an attractive price point of $800. I could see why you are thinking of trading all your gear for a simplified home setup.

I think the FP-E50 is Rolands answer to Yamaha’s popular DGX-670 that also retails for $800.

Since you already own the Roland FP-90 and two Roland BK9 Arrangers plus the Roland BK7m module I would like you to consider two things:

1.
Keyboard Action

The Roland FP-50 comes with Roland’s Progressive Hammer Action (PHA)-4 Standard Key Action.
This is significantly inferior to the PHA-50 Key Action that you have on the Roland FP-90. The black keys are harder to play closer to the top. Roland somewhat addressed this issue with the PHA-4 Concert Key Action that features longer keys.

I have the Roland RD-88 that features the PHA-4 Standard Action. I much prefer the PHA-50 key action on my Roland RD-2000 which feels luxurious, well balanced and easy to play over all the black and white keys. There is no comparison. I hate to go back to the PHA-4 action on the RD-88.

You will face the same issues when you compare the PHA-4 action on the FP-E50 vs. the PHA-50 action on your FP-90.


2.
Styles

As Diki has already pointed out, you are limited to the small library of onboard factory styles.
You already have the Roland BK7m Backing Module. Why not just MIDI this module into your FP-90 digital piano and enjoy the best of both worlds?

The FP-90 would give you a premium weighted piano action with escapement plus its gorgeous Piano voices with Roland’s Pure Acoustic Modeling engine. You can play all your Piano parts to the backing tracks of the Roland BK7m module.

The PHA-50 key action on the FP-90 feels better than the Kawai Responsive Hammer Action 3 on the MP7SE, better than the RH3 action on the Korg Kronos3 and better than the Graded Expression Action on the Yamaha Montage M8x.

I would suggest not trading in your Roland FP-90. It is one hell of a digital piano. It is not an arranger but your BK7m has you covered.

Best,

David

Thanks for all the informative responses. I didn't realize the FP e50 was a closed system Style wise like the EA7 and that was one of the questions I had about it. I have all my Songs on my Ipad programmed to change Styles on my BK9 and I would hate to lose that function and start all over. I also didn't realize the keybed was so inferior to my FP90. I thought i was just a little different. I do love the FP90 and I do have it midied to my BK7m usually just for bass/drums. The FPe50 caught my eye at the local music store so I was curious but I now see its drawbacks for me. So I guess my studio setup will not shrink as I have the best of both worlds.
Thanks again for the info.

Happy New Year all!!

I agree with the advice given by David and others: Don't get rid of your BK-9 just yet... The BK-7m doesn't offer style EDITING. Roland's own basic Style Converter software doesn't give you control over all of the parameters. And unlike Yamaha and Casio, there is no third-party software to create and fully edit Roland styles. Also, only a few recent Rolands like the BK-9 let you insert Alteration Mode events, which make quite a difference to how the style sounds and reacts to your chord changes.

Just to prevent misinformation from spreading: the E-A7 is NOT a closed ecosystem. Launched in 2015 and with a major update in 2017, it's the last fully-featured Roland arranger to date. Although it has only four fills instead of six, it can play, edit, and save styles compatible with any recent Roland arranger. However for some strange reason its PERFORMANCE MEMORY is structured differently. Instead of eight pages each having 128 performances as on older Rolands, the E-A7 has 10 banks each having 100 performances.

If you open a legacy "User Program Set" (UPS) on the E-A7, you can only access the first 100 performances in each page. And once you have done so, the UPS on the thumb drive will no longer be readable to older Roland instruments. I confirmed that it does read user programs (aka performance lists) from the older models, and you can still select a specific performance with a MIDI message, which is important to the way I use the arranger. (Obviously you have to specify hex values less than or equal to 99 in decimal!)

Bottom line, MIDIing a stage piano to the compact BK-7m is ergonomically workable. And I would keep a BK-9 in your studio for style editing. My $.02.

Ted
Thanks for the replay but before we go any further what are Alteration Mode events ? I don't think I ever heard that before.
Thanks

Just a minor correction here, but while older Roland's had a 128 entry Performance List, and the EA7 went to 100 or so, the BK series had a 999 entry Performance List, which is a LOT more practical for the working musicians, where 128 songs total before you need to faff around with the menus to load a different Performance List isn't NEARLY enough!

I'd say that the differences between BK9 and BK7-m are highly significant (I have both). And unless you actually DO a significant amount of highly detailed style creation and editing, you're going to be unlikely to care much about that one particular difference.

But the SN voices, the VK organ section, the Chord Sequencer, and the massively larger displays make the 7m very much the 'baby brother'. Not to mention, no mic input section, no Key Audio, fewer MFX, and fewer control inputs amongst many other differences.

To the casual user, some of these maybe missed until you end up needing them...

I'm completely gutted that Roland never used the BK9 guts for a more advanced module. Add back in my favorite BK9 stuff, it would be a powerhouse module even to this day!

There's a nice illustration in the reference manual Bill. In a nutshell, the system Roland used until 2004 or so was kind of simplistic. It basically worked a parallel transposition of the style part based on the played chord (subject to the pitch range of the selected instrument.) So when you triggered chords in real time, the results weren't always musically authentic. Alteration mode "nearest" is a bit like the "close" settings that Yamaha, Ketron, and Korg use. If a note that's already playing is part of the next chord, it's held instead of being retriggered with a new attack. And if a different note is needed to form the new chord, it selects the nearest inversion instead of jumping to a parallel transposition. Chord and pad parts usually sound better after this event has been added to the track.

I HAVE experimented a lot with the Roland style engine by looking at individual tracks' output in real time on an iPad app called Midiculous 4. Often the output isn't what I would have expected. A lot of the behaviors aren't documented, and some of the info in the reference manuals is incorrect! Perhaps the engineers changed their minds during development and didn't update the documentation? Compared to other brands of arrangers, Roland's style control parameters are limited. Yamaha, Korg, Ketron, and even Casio(!) all allow the user to tailor a style's behavior more than Roland does. Considering how few user parameters Rolands have, the styles sound great and are amazingly playable!

One thing I always wish they would have added though is a "non-transposing" flag. There are workarounds to achieve this, but they're clumsy. For example, on the E-A7 you could potentially copy style tracks to the multipads (which ALWAYS transpose) and then trigger the pads over a non-transposing SMF. Or perhaps you could record the sequence as a drum track(!), and then loop the MIDI back in to sound on the "Upper 2" voice? Or slave in an external sequencer? Why did they make it so hard??

A lot of great info and insights. I guess I got over excited about the E50. Its nice but compared to what I already have it would be too big of a step down. Someday, maybe soon, I'll really have to downsize and revisit it or something similar. Right now since I'm not doing gigs anymore I mostly just use my FP90 midied to my BK7m, and sometimes I don't even turn the Bk on, just play piano, so nice ! Going from that back to my BK9 the key bed feels so different and the piano sound is really lacking compared to the FP90 but for what it is its still one of the best Arrangers, especially for gigging musicians. Diki's idea of a BK9 module is something I've also thought about but Roland just isn't interested these days.