First shipment of Roland E-A7 has landed

Pretty cool little keyboard, I think it's gonna give the PSR series a run for their money

So how are they for Western Music? How do they compare to the italian Roland arranger products

Hope you sell 12 in one day. Lloyd

I wish Roland success with this to earn enough money they can invest in new up-market instruments.

I am hard headed for this...

Marketing for the product so far has been pretty bad, and mostly aimed at the oriental markets...

Their marketing decisions, or lack of, has an Albatross around their necks for some years now, at least when at comes to arrangers.

Only when it comes to arrangers...

Marketing for their Aira range is spot on..

Well, not only regarding arrangers, if you see marketing in the broader sense including product design, it was, for instance, a stupid restriction to limit the great Integra to 64 studio sets, which makes it usable for live purposes with workarounds only. I just hope the changes in the management and ownership structure has lead to changes in this respect. Aira might be a positive indication.

Has Roland US put out an official demo video English?

http://www.roland.com/products/e-a7/

Spec wise, the Roland E-A7 looks decent enough for the price range. Wave Expansion Memory is still quite low at 128 MBs.

I do like the Song Chord Extractor feature idea. I guess it automatically detects the chords in smf files. I have to run my midi songs through a program like PSRUIT to predetermine what midi channels I want analyzed to extract the chords. I generally would make up sheet music in Sibelius with the selected notation, lyrics, and chords and rework the midi channels for the parts I want to play on my Tyros 5 and what midi parts to be played by the midi song file.

For the more complex midi songs or my own compositions I will sync the midi song file to the selected customized style and optional multipad play with automatic OTS settings, and I simply play along with the printed sheet music, lyrics, and follow the chords to track the style to the synced midi song file. Of course simpler songs, I just use the suitable style. Still working on transferring all my sheet music to tablet and PDF display.

I would think on the E-A7 the Song Chord Extractor would work similar and display the detected chords from the SMF so you can play along with a style. Too bad Roland doesn't come out with a nice new full featured TOTL arranger. I always liked the Roland quality.

Marcus

How much is this unit ? how does it compair to Bk 9

BK-9 dropped out!
I just checked the Thomann website. No more BK-9 listed. When I google for BK-9 Thomann, I find a page saying "This product is no more in our product range" (in German).

Regarding the comparison: E-A7
-is cheaper (around 1,100 vs 1,700€)
-has more world/ethnic sounds
-has NO SuperNatural sounds
-has a 128MB RAM for samples (but probably not conveniently usable for sound packages/libraries).

BK-9 gone already? Must've bombed big time.

Someone in the Roland Arranger forum had already announced that the BK-9 would be phased out soon. A consequence of Roland Europe's demise.
It was such a bad seller, Thomann had no more than 7 reviews in the end, even though the price was first reduced from 1,999 to 1,699 and then to 1,470 Euros.

Does it have a looper/ chord sequencer.

Obviously not. And no ordinary sequencer either, just WAV audio recording.
http://www.roland.com/products/e-a7/specifications/

Waveform List is available!
http://cdn.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/E-A7_Waveform_List_e01_W.pdf

First impression: Lots and lots of ethnic sounds. But restrained quality with grand pianos: There's only one piano with 3 velocity layers (waveforms 1-18, "Pno SX" in mp, f and ff, each in 3 variants), two others with 2 layers.
But the fact that Roland publishes a waveform list, not only a sound list, reveals that the E-A7 obviously has synthesizer functionality, for pure arrangers waveforms are not shown.

Look at this:
902 OrSax Kyof01
903 OrSax Kyof02
904 OrSax Kyof03
905 OrSax Kyof04
906 OrSax Kyof05
907 OrSax Kyof06
908 OrSax Kyof07
909 OrSax Kyof08
910 OrSax Kyof09
911 OrSax Kyof10
912 OrSax Kyof11
913 OrSax Kyof12
914 OrSax Kyof13
915 OrSax Kyof14
916 OrSax Kyof15
917 OrSax Kyof16
918 OrSax Kyof17
919 OrSax Kyof18
920 OrSax Kyof19
921 OrSax Kyof20
922 OrSax Kyof21
923 OrSax Kyof22
924 OrSax Kyof23
925 OrSax Kyof24
926 OrSax Kyof25
927 OrSax Kyof26
928 OrSax Kyof27
929 OrSax Kyof28
930 OrSax Kyof29
931 OrSax Kyof30
932 OrSax Kyof31
933 OrSax Kyof32
934 OrSax Kyof33
935 OrSax Kyof34
936 OrSax Kyof35
937 OrSax Kyof36
938 OrSax Kyof37
939 OrSax Kyof38
940 OrSax Kyof39
941 OrSax Kyof40
942 OrSax KyofA1
943 OrSax KyofA2

So much for oriental saxophones in this E-A7...

There are 4,700 waveforms in total!

Paul (montunoman) it has Multipads, which I think is a first for Roland arrangers. Personally I would like to try this board, maybe they will get one at the Sam Ash off of US-75 in Dallas.

Hi Ted, I've seen some Roland arrangers at Lancaster Music and Murphy's Music in Irving.

Hi!

Nice Roland E-A7 demo from Budapest Music Expo 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jz3tZmwS4c

/fozzie

Update/correction to my earlier post: The BK-9 has reappeared in the Thomann product range today, it is supposed to be available in late December again with a third price reduction: 1,298 Euros!
http://www.thomann.de/de/roland_bk_9.htm

Which is a bargain....