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Average rating:
4.4 out of 5
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First, please excuse my bad english! if there are errors in grammars, i�m to blame, not the synth!In Short! the d 550 is an absolutely great Synth! Everybody, who said, it�s not programmable, should learn to programm their own sounds or buy presetsynths! By the way, there is f.e. Sounddiver by emagic and with this, programming should be easy! i have a lot of synths (Roland xp 80, juno, d 110, d 70, Yamaha s 80, an 1x, tg 55, tg 77 Korg 03/rw) and none of this synths have the ability to create some sounds of the d 550. And everybody, who are complaining, that the pianos doesn�t sound good, should learn something about synthesizers! And the worst thing i read in these reviews, is that a Korg M 1 sounds better! Bullshit! the M 1 has a lot of different sounds, right! but none of these sounds are really good. even, when the M 1 was young, there were better synth! the only advantage of the m 1 was, that it was the first workstation.
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i've had my d50 for ages and to be honest i would'nt part with it for anything, sure there are other and more powerful synths out there but when it matters the d50 still counts where it matters; i think people got too hung up on the onboard sounds some were very overused and everyone got sick of hearing them but a little judicious pruning of the sounds and they sound as fresh as they ever did. now dont get me wrong this is not a synth for everyone but i'd say most people or bands would use it, the m1 killed it when it came out but i dont know why the sounds are awfull, i think what people forget is that the m1 had to use mass'es of fx to sound big the d50 already did sound big it used fx to produce the weirder sounds some very cold some very warm. come on chaps dont get hung up on this is better than that or whatever they are different, if everything sounded the same it would be a very boring world like the keyboards for what they are not what they are not. to me roland have always sound warm glassy and almost transparent sounds. thanks all.
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Good once. Now hideously out of date and with nothing to offer. Don't buy unless very cheap. Funny enough they aren't as cheap as you would think. Often,even more expensive than an M1 which is ten times the synth in every way. If you need an old Roland rompler buy yourself a kicking JD800. The D50's time has come and gone and will never return. As always, mostly played by guys in pubs. The M1 came out a little too close for the D50 and sunk it without trace. Any new rompler is light years better in every way, so why bother? Nostalgia I suppose.
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i play industrial/ambiant music.the d50 is a great synth for odd digital pad,string and very odd digital noises.alot of the factory/card patches are way too 80s pop sounding but most can be altererd to be quite usefull.i mostly use it for pad/string sound where it excells at.i try to stay away from the cheesy horns and piano sounds.as far as editing-screw using the optional factory programmer,i use sounddiver and it works very well and is easy to do editing.i recently had a key that wouldnt respond to velocity,if you have that problem it is easily repaired by opening up the unit and cleaning the lil rubber contacts the keys use to trigger the sound.i havent had any other problems ever besides that ,so i can say that the d50 is a very reliable board.and it feels great to play-some of rolands best keyboard action.its sound is excellent to,just dont expect to get a great bass sound and youll stay happy.
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The fact that best illustrates how I feel about the D-550 is that I only owned it for four months. During that time, I spent a lot of time programming it but I rarely liked the sounds the D-550 produced. I'm a very mediocre programmer, so in order to pinpoint the problem, I downloaded a ton patches off the internet and checked them out one by one. It turned out we were both to blame - I for poor programming and the D-550 for mellow, expressionless sound.
Subjectively speaking, I found patch programming very difficult, especially making the transition between the sampled attack and the synthesised "body" of the sound, in particular when all four partials were used. If a sound sort-of worked in a certain range, it was bound to sound terrible two octaves up or down. I tried to solve this problem by relying only on the analogue waveforms, but it turned out to be a bad idea; the D-550 relies on its samples for character and if you leave them out, you get a cold and thin analogue emulation. To sum up, I suspect that I was trying to use the D-550 for something it wasn't made to do and with my programming skills, I was bound to fail. I DID manage to get one aggressive sound out of it, the only one that made it into a song. If you'd like to hear it, please e-mail me at sartre@siol.net
I admit, I was warned before I bought it: "this is a pad synth, my boy", the owner said. But I thought I knew better and I'd be able to squeeze aggression out of it yet. I wasn't though, and even though that, theoretically, a synth that defined the late 80's pop sound should work great in an 80's pop band, this wasn't the case. I'm going to spend the money from the sale on another Roland - the MKS-30. It's a punchy, warm, and simple analogue synth - everything I missed in the D-550.
I must stress that the D-550 is by no means a bad synth, but it's not an all-rounder. It will do great strings, pads and ethereal sounds, but it is likely to disappoint as a lead or bass synth. Think carefully about your needs before you buy this one - you can save yourself some bother.
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