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.

I think style creation and editing is rather like, to use car metaphors, like detailed tuning of a car's engine, mapping the ECM, changing gear ratios, mapping the brake and accelerator curves, fine tuning the spring rates and damper settings...

Most people want to get into a car and just DRIVE.

Here in the west, our music is pretty well represented by the ROM style selection, with very little need to tweak. However, Yamaha and especially Korg went after the middle and far east market, always had some kind of sampler, and those types of music are far more detailed in how the style plays back, and Y&K always had pretty detailed style engines.

But, in truth, when it came to western music, the need just isn't there, and to be quite honest, despite a massively more detailed style editing engine, I have rarely if EVER heard much in the way of user styles that can hold a candle to the ROM styles that come with an arranger. It sure seems an awful waste of resources with next to no upside (at least for western music).

I think Roland kind of figured this out pretty early. Sure, they must have some custom software they gave the ROM dev team, because there's a fair bit of control over note ranges and alteration modes on the styles themselves, but they never saw fit to release it to the users.

Maybe, just like allowing a regular driver to screw with the spring rates, steering rack or ECM, they figured the users would do more harm than good! And spending a chunk of money developing software for at best 1% of their base wasn't a winning proposition?

It's the same thing with one of my pet peeves... why can't modern arrangers allow you to remap every last button knob and slider for external gear control? None of them do. Pretty much all of them got a ton of buttons that can't send MIDI at all, and the few that do rarely allow you to remap what they send to better suit a receiving device.

But, in the end, I realize that arrangers have ALWAYS been designed to be basically standalone, single keyboards designed to do everything in the one keyboard. And those that want them to double as the master keyboard in a larger rig are the 1%. Thus, not significantly worthy of the considerable effort designing that would take.

So, we use them the way they come. For better AND worse. There's something missing from EVERY arranger model, and there's something it does the others can't. The trick is discovering what you REALLY need, then picking the model that does it, and putting up with what it don't!

Lol, when I had my Mustang GT, I did have software for tuning it ;-)

Sometimes it's good to be able to change things, even though it takes a bit of trial and error. I modified a factory style and got it 90% to where I wanted. But the bass would still shift to a higher octave between Ab and G. So when I played a descending bassline for a song written in G major, the bass would go UP when i reached the I chord. It took a lot of experimenting, but I was eventually able to change the wrap point.

It would have been easier to use the master transpose, and send the notes through MIDI Out to an external sequencer, where they could be transposed back to the original key! Crazy!

As far as I'm concerned, it's important for users to be able to make changes such as this. Other brands include the ability to create and edit styles so there IS a demand for doing so. Roland should have made it easier and more flexible.

Thanks guys . Lots of thoughtful input in your posts.Yes when i used Styles more as when I was doing gigs I did edit them. Replace instruments, mute parts, adjust volume and EFX. Mostly to get more punch and simplicity so they wouldn't sound so "canned" Your right about the 1% of users delving deeply into their boards.
I have a friend here who spends countless hours revamping and creating styles on his Yamaha. His band ( wife singer with a Keytar and a killer sax player ) have a regular gig at a club " Ruby Lee's on Hilton Head SC "which caterers mostly to an older Black audience. So he's going from Chuck Brown go go to Frankie Beverly to Neyo and they love it.
But for most of us Roland did give us a decent group of Styles to sork with. After looking at the E50 Style list and listening to a few I think I could find whatever I need but again thats down the road, I'm staying put for now. ! Thanks

Quite honestly, if I'm THAT hung up on having the right bassline, I'll use a sequence. Throw in four Mark/Jump points, I can still jack around with it live.

The whole songstyle thing always left me puzzled. Damn sight easier to use an SMF!

The audience don't give a rats HOW we create our backing. 🤣

Except they can tell when you are using canned (Song) styles and so just think you are just pressing buttons with the keyboard doing everything for you (You are effectivly playing along to a style), whereas those that turn the styles down to minimum and play the keys get tagged as "wow" they know what they are doing and how to play.

Canned styles are ideal for the home hobby player as they can sound great without the wait (They don't need to put days and days of practice in to get something that sounds good to their friends and family) which is what the arranger keyboard has always been designed for, (The arranger keyboard came from the easy play features of the popular home organs of the time and then developed into there own) however a pro musician can also make them sing without needing all the fancy backing as they are prepared to put the time in to practice, and thus show their talent, not the keyboards talent.

Bill

Maybe where you come from, Bill. Over here, we got acts that use audio, acts that use SMF's, acts that use styles, and there's ZERO difference in audience recognition. You know what the audience DOES listen to (and it’s going to hurt!)..?

The singer.

You can spend days customizing a style. You can spend days customizing a sequence. You can spend days customizing a multitrack backing track. The ONLY thing the audience listens to at all is the singer and the solos.

We have a generation raised on karaoke nowadays. They actually WANT the backing as close to the record, it helps them sing along..!

Maybe Europe has a totally different scene, organ culture still exists as a niche entertainment for a dwindling generation that remembers the 40's and 50's, and holidays by the seaside and concerts by the organist at the local Palais maybe are part of some cultural memory. But that doesn't really exist in America. There's little nostalgia for a Butlin's holiday camp era.

When it comes to solo acts, it's all about the singer. You could put a gun to their heads and they couldn't tell you if we're using audio, styles or sequences. They CAN tell if you're playing solo piano, no accompaniment, but past that, it's 'who cares?'.

It's the singer, and the solos. And, to be quite frank, unless you're playing an organ solo, you need TWO HANDS to solo as effectively as the people you're imitating. And that alone, for me, rules out styles. You might WANT to bend that sax part, or that guitar solo, or do a flowery two handed piano arpeggio... but the song dictates a chord change exactly when you want to do that bend.

So the bend doesn't happen. And you end up with stiff, inexpressive solos and all that work on the style's bassline is wasted. Anyone who's ever played in a band knows what I'm talking about. To solo WELL takes two hands. And the arranger (in style mode) gives you ONE.

Now, don't get me wrong. I spend a LOT of time remixing audio tracks, editing sequences and working on my keyboard sounds. It's going to help me play better to them if they rock! And, even if you rarely use styles, arrangers make the BEST keyboard type for working, gigging soloists compared to workstations or stage pianos with a laptop. They're designed for what we do live, not meant to be studio tools with little ability to do the whole show!

But I fear the days of the audience (that shows up in bars and restaurants) knowing whether you're using styles, sequences or audio, and especially if you are using them as created or whether you edited the living poo out of them have pretty much disappeared.

Virtually all the shortcomings of sequencing that made us prefer styles in say the early 90's are gone. Nowadays it's a piece of cake to lengthen or shorten an SMF. Piece of cake to do extra solos. Piece of cake to medley to another sequence or audio tracks. Piece of cake to mute and unmute Parts on the fly to create a work of music that can vary nightly.

In the meantime, arrangers didn't give us back our left hand. Not unless you're doing rote repetition of a chord sequence, and somebody tell me what's the difference between playing over a CS playing the preset chords into an arranger, and playing over a sequence recorded by playing chords into an arranger or an audio recording of that sequence?

Here in America, Bill, 30 years ago I might have agreed with you. But technology and audience tastes and economic reality have long moved on over here. It's close to impossible for a non-musician to tell the difference HOW we create our backing. 90% of what we do about them is recognized by ONE person. Us..!

That's not to say I don't look back fondly on my Butlin's years (loved Clacton-on Sea!) and playing the organ. But I'd starve over here sticking to those guns... 🤩

Couple of thoughts:
Yes Diki hit it. For live performance its all about the vocals !

Update on my misguided interest in the Roland FP e50.. Yes you can add new Styles from Roland. I'm not sure of the complete process but there are others available, although with the variety already given I don't think I would need them.
And you can edit the Styles parts. Change instruments, volume and mute.
No Mark Jump feature. That's a big omission.

If I remember correctly though, the only Roland styles you can add are strictly purchased styles directly through their portal. If you've got 30 years worth of styles from every major Roland arranger and converted styles from other brands, too bad.

It's quite the cash grab..! We haven't had to deal with a closed ecosystem since the early days, with extra styles having to come on a proprietary card.

For me, it's never been about the total style count. A couple of hundred 'world styles' are of no use to me. Likewise ballroom styles, 'freeplay' styles or anything like that.

But if there's only a couple of bluegrass, or only the one 'one drop' reggae, or a couple of rock shuffles, whatever, that's going to force you to use the same style repeatedly. That's a no-no in my book.

What's really disappointing me about the FP-E50 is that the features we want are mature, work well, are almost indispensable to the working musician, and have been DELIBERATELY omitted. Almost as if Roland have forgotten 30 years of hard earned experience in the arranger segment...

But that's Roland in a nutshell. Every model that came out felt like the team that developed it had nobody included from the previous team. Amazing features never got included in the NEXT model. Rinse and repeat.

We would make fun of each PSR or Tyros model being tiny incremental improvements, but one thing Yamaha virtually never did was drop a feature. What you used daily, what you had got used to was still there. Not Roland..! 🙄

I didn't know you had to buy the new Styles, just saw they were available. Bummer. Like you said. I also have tons of older Styles and I'd hate to lose them.
And Roland not looking back to what we have is also shortsighted but I guess they figure who is that into arrangers anymore, maybe a few newbies and they won't mind starting from scratch.
Glad I have what I need but I was just curious why the FPe50 didn't get more attention here.

I think that the few people into arrangers these days are us...

If you look at keyboard retail sites like Sweetwater, Thomman etc, and sort by 'most popular' you've got to look way down the list to find a mid-line arranger or better. The only things that pop up early are $200-400 kids' toy arrangers.

I don't think this is unexpected. Arrangers have little use making modern music. So who's left? Us. Players that a) LIKE arrangers, b) play primarily oldies music, and c) have had decades getting accustomed to the advanced features that make what we do easier.

And dropping those features to go chasing a demographic that doesn't seem to exist strikes me as yet another suicide run by the manufacturers. You can't sell them to kids because they suck at modern music, and you can't sell them to arranger players because they suck at being arrangers!

Awesome job, Roland!