Roland System-8 – historic turning point?
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The bender section is astounding. The combined pitchbend-modulation lever is typical of Roland and nothing new, of
course. Praise where praise is due: the bender is extremely stable and lies well in the hand. But it’s interesting: not
all performance results are close to what you’d expect. To be specific: filter frequency bending is just too gentle,
even at maximum settings (bender/FILTER slider all the way up – max. range of 255). The desired “filter sweeps” are
fairly tame, not even close to any sort of dramatic change in sound, whereas most users are looking for at least twice
or three times that effect. Anyway, that’s what benders are designed to do: both subtle AND dramatic changes in
sound.
Along with all the surprises, something to get used to: by a change of sound, the settings in the bender section get
“lost”. Which can be seen as an advantage or a disadvantage. Let’s look back to the Jupiter-8. Its pre-set sliders and
switches in the bender area (VCO at “exactly” one octave, VCF at maximum, or whatever) at the left side of the
keyboard remain continuously available until changed by the user. Which has the advantage that (the pre-set)
bender-performance remains available, regardless of what sound changes are made. Pre-set is pre-set, so to speak.
The disadvantage: the settings for the said performance are permanent and therefore “not” a component of the
archived sound (logically making an individual bender-performance per sound impossible).
