RD-300s & Roland JV-1080

[J.W. Swaters]

I've got my Roland RD 300S connected to a Roland JV-1080. The issue I have is not all key-strokes are coming through from my piano to the JV-1080. RD300 is connected to midi out, goes into midi in on the JV-1080, both are on midi channel 1. Any help, advise would be highly appreciated.

 

[happyrat1]

Personally I'm mystified why it's happening that way.

Perhaps the Roland Clan Forums http://forums.rolandclan.com/ can give you some specifics on why the hardware is misbehaving?

Gary

 

[J.W. Swaters]

Thanks for your reply, I was as mystified as you are so that makes two....

 

[Ted Nicoson]

JW

I need a little clarification on your wording. When you say "not all key-strokes are coming through", do you mean SOME of the key strokes ARE getting through or did you get your words twisted around, when you meant "all of the key-strokes are not coming through" (meaning nothing is getting through)? If nothing is coming through, you probably just have a basic connectivity problem - bad cable, etc, but if some things are coming through, then you could have an intermittent cable connection, etc. but you could also have a velocity setting mismatch: like the RD300 is transmitting velocities that are at the bottom edge of the JV-1080's threshold, or the JV-1080's threshold is so high that it is at the top edge of what the RD-300 is sending. I ran into a similar situation many years ago, when I tried to expand my Yamaha PSR-3000's voice palette by connecting it to my JV-2080. Everything came through, but the velocity level of the Yamaha's keybed, which was fine for its own internal sound engine, was so low going out the MIDI Out jack that it made the JV-2080 unuseable. Because of the limitations of the settings on both units, I was never able to resolve the problem.

 

[Fred Coulter]

the velocity level of the Yamaha's keybed, which was fine for its own internal sound engine, was so low going out the MIDI Out jack that it made the JV-2080 unuseable.

My DX7 could only send velocity out of 100 or less. This was inherent to the design of the keyboard. There was a company called Grey Matter response which created an add-on board for the DX7 which let it send higher value velocity messages.

[End old fogies comment.]

 

[J.W. Swaters]

JW

I need a little clarification on your wording. When you say "not all key-strokes are coming through", do you mean SOME of the key strokes ARE getting through or did you get your words twisted around, when you meant "all of the key-strokes are not coming through" (meaning nothing is getting through)? If nothing is coming through, you probably just have a basic connectivity problem - bad cable, etc, but if some things are coming through, then you could have an intermittent cable connection, etc. but you could also have a velocity setting mismatch: like the RD300 is transmitting velocities that are at the bottom edge of the JV-1080's threshold, or the JV-1080's threshold is so high that it is at the top edge of what the RD-300 is sending. I ran into a similar situation many years ago, when I tried to expand my Yamaha PSR-3000's voice palette by connecting it to my JV-2080. Everything came through, but the velocity level of the Yamaha's keybed, which was fine for its own internal sound engine, was so low going out the MIDI Out jack that it made the JV-2080 unuseable. Because of the limitations of the settings on both units, I was never able to resolve the problem.

This doesn´t sound good, I did indeed mean that some keystrokes were getting through and others aren´t )at least not the first time I touch the key

 

[J.W. Swaters]

I must admit this doesn´t sound good. Indeed some of the keystrokes are getting through and other don´t specifically when I play fast. If I wait for a while and hit the same key that wasn´t producing a sound earlier it will the second time.

 

[Fred Coulter]

First, replace the cable with a not-cheap one from a music store. Does the problem continue?

Do you have any other keyboards or sound module that you could test with? (Do you have a friend that will lend you one?) Replace the JV-1080 with the borrowed gear and see if you have the same problem. If you do, then you know the problem is with the sending unit. If you don't, then the problem may be with the receiving unit.

To double check that, replace the RD 300S with the borrowed unit, and see if it works works connected to the JV-1080. If it does, then you know it's a problem with the RD 300S, not the JV-1080.

At least this way you're narrowing the source of the problem.

 

[Ted Nicoson]

JW

After mulling this over for a couple of days, the only thing that seems to make any sense is that you are running out of polyphony on the JV-1080. Normally, unless you want to do some complex voice splitting or layering on the JV-1080, you should have it set to "Patch" mode, so that only the selected voice responds to signals from the RD-300. If you DO use "Performance" mode, only the desired "Performance Parts" (1-16) should be set to the RD-300's transmit channel with their MIDI receive switches turned ON. All unwanted parts should be set to a different channel and/or have their MIDI receive switches turned OFF. By default, the JV-1080 will assign some voice to each "Part" in a "Performance". Each one of these voices can use up to 4 oscillators. If you have a 4 oscillator voice assigned to each of the 16 "Parts" in a "Performance" and all of the "Parts" are assigned to the same MIDI receive channel and have their MIDI receive switches turned ON, then every key press on the RD-300 will turn on 64 oscillators in the JV-1080 - which IS the JV-1080's polyphony limit. This situation becomes more convoluted if you are using a sustain pedal. I doubt very much that your set up is this extreme, if, in fact, that is even your problem, but it is a good place to start looking.

Perhaps a more realistic scenario would go something like this. You want a 2 oscillator piano voice layered with a 2 oscillator strings voice. Each keypress on the driving keyboard will turn on four oscillators in the JV-1080, but you want to fatten it up a bit, so you assign the same set up to Channels 1 and 2 and trigger them both simultaneously. Now each keypress turns on 8 oscillators. Depending on your playing style, if you are using four finger chords with your left hand and three part harmony with your right hand, along with generous use of a sustain pedal, you could definitely run into some polyphony problems. Normally, polyphony stealing just truncates the oldest notes first, but sustain pedals seem to complicate this. Just something to think about.

Good luck !

Regards,

Ted

 

[happyrat1]

I think you've hit the nail on the head Ted. Voice stealing isn't too much of a problem with a modern keyboard but with this antique 16 voices is a serious limit.

Personally all my experiences are with Old Romplers and synths dating back about 20 years or so. Even so, most of my old keyboards topped out about 32 voices or so meaning I never really had to deal with the problem in practice.

Gary

 

[Ted Nicoson]

Gary

The actual polyphony of the XP-80 rompler and the JV-1080 and 2080 modules was/is 64. I say "is" because I still use my XP-80 and JV-2080. The "16" comes from the 16 multi-timbral parts of a "Performance" - one part for each of the 16 MIDI channels - but you could actually assign the parts to channels any way you wanted to - one part per channel, all parts to the same channel, two parts to each of 8 channels, etc. The polyphony comes in at the "element" level - what Roland has traditionally called a tone. Each "Part" in the "Performance" could consist of up to 4 "elements" ("tones" or oscillators). So, if you loaded up a Performance with 16 four-element Parts, assigned them all to the same channel so that they all turned on with the same key, you were at the polyphony limit. Now, more reallistically, and in reference to your comment about romplers with polyphonies of 32, with the XP-80 and JV-1080/2080 you almost had to use Performance Parts with at least 2 elements each, or they would sound too thin. So if you were playing a single 2-element Part (piano, etc.), you only had an effective polyphony of 32. I think each member of that product line featured a voice called "64 Voice Piano". As its name suggests, it was a single element (oscillator) piano voice that had an actual and effective polyphony of 64 - as long as you did not layer it with anything else. It was OK, and sounded superior to the single element GM/GS (SC-55/SC-88/etc) voices of the time, for no other reason than because it used a wave sample that was considerably larger than the GM/GS voices, but it could not hold a candle to the other multi-element voices of the JV/XP line. Most of the "higher" (3 and 4) voice elements were just instantaneous attack articulation sounds like string-strike "twangs" and hammer action "thunks" on the piano voices or string bends or slides on guitar voices, etc. The "sustaining" elements were usually placed in slots 1 and 2, but if you were close to your polyphony limit, the instantaneous articulation stuff could "steal" and noticeably truncate a sustaining part. If I had problems with that, I would just delete the articulaiton elements 3 and 4 and save it as a user voice - problem solved.

AND . . . THEN . . . some years ago I bought a thing called a Motif XS. WOW ! It had a whopping polyphony of 128 . . . BUT . . . It used 8 element voices, so by the time you loaded up this and tweaked that and got it all sounding just the way you wanted you were back down to a per-voice "effective" polyphony of about . . . . "32". You just can not win in this game !