Roland E80 Review

Every now and again, Roland bring out a keyboard that features some great ideas and clever technology. Well the New Roland E80 puts their arranger keyboards back on track. This is a fantastic looking instrument and offers the player everything they could want. The keyboard has just about every feature imaginable, and a few extras.
Roland have a long history of making keyboards for the home musician and of course, gigging entertainer. The E80 fits neatly into both of those categories.
When you turn the keyboard on for the first time, you immediately see a fantastic full colour touch screen which is one of the best i have seen to date. Some touch screens can be slow to respond and difficult to get on with. The Screen on the Roland is easy to operate and the touch element is sensitive enough to register even those with a gentle touch.
The screen is the heart of the machine, showing you every little bit of information you need to know.
To choose a style, simply press which genre you want, and the screen then moves you to various pages of styles. Simply touch the one you want and that's it - done!
I take my hat off to Roland as they have made the menu system easy to get around - no button pushing for days just to change the tempo or voice. One thing i must comment on is the angle at which the screen is set. I tried playing the keyboard in normal daylight, and at some angles the screen could be difficult to read, even after adjusting the contrast setting - maybe a tilting touch screen would be a good addition on the next model?

Anyway, back to the voices.
Roland have packed a whopping 1100 voices - plus the added benefit of a drawbar section which I had great fun with. The sliders work in real time and are just like having a hammond organ in front of you, a massive improvement on buttons as you can't beat the real thing.
Ten out of ten for the drawbars - you will love them.
The voices are mixed. Some of the voices are outstanding such as the guitars, choirs, woodwind and pad voices. Personally, i found the piano sound too muddy for my liking - but one quick click of the MFX button and you can soon alter that.
The MFX button is the key to a good sound, and a fantastic sound. By clicking this button you have access to controls such as reverb, EQ and all manner of other tone changing features - and you can even control the reverb using one of the drawbar sliders - fantastic
All in all the voices on the Roland are very good - but remember, if you want to make the sounds your own, use the MFX button, its a great feature.
The styles are set into 12 categories, 8 Beat, 16 Beat, Live Band, Rock, Disco Dance, Contemp, Ballroom, Jazz Blues, 50's & 60's, Bossa Samba, Latin and World.
The backing styles are wide and varied enough for any musician to be able to sit down and play. As you will see from the photograph, each backing has 4 variations, 4 intros, 4 endings and fade in and fade out.
Bass inversion is a must on any keyboard and gives the musician the ability to dictate the bass notes - a great feature.
All in all the backing section is good, but i think too much focus has been placed on funk and contemporary based styles. I would have liked to have seen less funk and more pop based.
One criticism is that the Dance and Disco styles were already out of date, The Ibiza and house styles sound like something from 1999 and not 2007 - but apart from that the style section gets a big thumbs up from us.
One other interesting addition to mention before we move away from the style section is the use of the D BEAM. D BEAM is a sensor which is placed just above the screen and if you should have your hand in front of it - depending on which feature you have asked it to activate, it will turn it on or off - impressive.
So, if you feel the need to wave your arms around, you can get the keyboard to do all manner of things - such as drum break, slow the tempo up and down and even trigger sound effects such as dog bark or telephone! great fun.
Moving on to the voice section now in more detail. The voices are set also into categories, and offer the usual sounds. The brass section offers a wide selection of good quality voices, and even a trumpet similar to the SA voice on the Yamaha Tyros. This keyboard has the best choirs in the business - they are spine tinglingly fantastic.
The electric guitars are also out of this world. The only section which seems to be lacking slightly is the Piano - i was expecting a fantastic Steinway , but got a weak and spineless piano sound, but don't let that put you off, with a bit of patience, you can soon edit the voice to sound how you want.

Recording using the E80
It's childsplay - simply press the record button and off you go. The fun doesn't stop there thought, go into the 16 track sequencer and then pick a part that has not been recorded onto and "walla", your multi-tracking. We had a lot of fun with the sequencer, but we found one serious flaw with it.
If you record a backing track and use the transpose buttons whilst recording, the machine will record the transpose information and play it back ok, but if you then want to add a track over the top and still want to press the transpose button - it is not possible.
The multi-track facility will not record parts with different transposes within them - this is really bad and i would advise Roland to have a look at this. Every keyboard we have looked at so far would allow this feature - apart from the E80.
The E80 also uses a PCMCIA slot to store data (which is a bit odd) when other manufacturers are adding USB connectors on the front of their keyboards. I would prefer to see USB key drives used and for this i would say that this is another bad feature on the Roland.

Singing with the E80
The keyboard has (one of the best) vocal harmony features on any keyboard i have ever seen, the quality is out of this world and for any musicians who gig with a keyboard - this one has to be taken seriously - VERY SERIOUSLY. I can't even begin to review this section and would advise you to go to your local music store and try it for yourself.

All in all we are really impressed with the the E80. There are a few things that we would like to see changed but you can't have everything (or can you?). If you are a gigging musician then the E80 is in my view the best keyboard on the market - 10/10
If you are a home musician who has moved from organ and looking for a keyboard then the drawbars on this keyboard will make you feel at home right away and the overall sound will impress you. There may be a few too many funk styles, but it is still a fantastic instrument and is on a Par with other top of the range arranger keyboards.

We have recorded a few tracks using the Roland E80 which we will feature on our site shortly, meantime let us know what you think of the Roland E80 in our forum. We have started a thread just to give feedback about this review.