The great thing about a company so steeped in electronic music production as Roland is that the R&D resources lavished on top-end synth engines permeate through its disparate ranges, and the Octapad benefits hugely from decades of heavy-duty programming and sound creation. The acoustic sounds (both drum kit and ethnic percussion) are involving and realistic, while the electronic offerings are chunky and have that lovely 'produced' depth that is typical of all that Roland has turned out, from the JV synth series on. The wonderfully responsive pads are lovely to play and the stock of preset patches serves up an endlessly satisfying selection of full-bodied tones. Hands onĮven without delving into the complexities of creating loops or editing sounds, the new Octapad is impressive. In short, it's a powerful little package. Fifty kits made up from nearly 700 sounds, 30 multi-effect types, seven ambience settings and the ability to create up to 50 phrase loops are just some of the SPD-30's highlights. Internally, things continue in much the same vein. In all, it's a thoroughly modern package that's been well conceived to meet the demands of both studio and live use. MIDI in/ out is to be expected, as are L/R stereo and headphone outs and Mix In socket for iPods etc but there are also five 0.25" sockets to allow for use with V-Drum ride, hi-hat, snare and kick pads (so you could potentially use the Octapad as a super-compact e-kit), plus USB MIDI connection and a USB memory slot for storing user-created data. Roland continued the line in 2010 with the Octapad SPD-30 which includes on-board sounds and effects.The rear of the unit is equally impressive - assuming you're fascinated by the interconnectivity offered by hi-tech musical production tools, of course. These SPD Series products apart from the SPD-20 and 20x had not been named "Octapad" on the product panel. Roland SPD-8 (1990), SPD-11 (1993), and SPD-20 (1998) Īfter the Pad-80, Roland continued to release SPD-8 with on-board sounds, as a standalone instrument in 1990, SPD-11 in 1993, which not only had more sounds but also built-in effects processing, and SPD-20 in 1998, which had more on-board sounds. The Pad-80 had a patch chain function that allowed a series of 32 patches to be arranged in any sequence, eight of these chains could be stored in memory. Further improvements to the MIDI specification included the control of modulation, pitch bend and aftertouch using a foot pedal, along with full System Exclusive (SysEx) capability. The memory was increased, allowing up to 64 different patches internally and another 64 patches to be stored on a Roland M-256E memory card. These new features were groundbreaking at the time, and are still utilized in Roland's electronic percussion today. This feature became useful for creating more realistic sounding drum parts, and in addition allowed drummers to play melodic instruments with greater ease. Improvements in this second model included the ability to play up to three notes per pad, and velocity switching, which allowed the user to stack or alternate between the assigned notes depending on how hard the pads were struck. Again the Pad-80 was an eight pad MIDI controller that allowed for various types of MIDI sound sources. The second model, introduced in 1989, was the Pad-80 Octapad II.
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