Roland E-36 and PR-100 Sessions

Roland PR-100

Before venturing into computers all the sequencing I did was performed on a Roland PR-100, although at the time it was a joy to work with in hindsight it had limitations that today would easily be worked around. The most obvious of these limitations was only two MIDI tracks could be recorded at anyone time before the merging of the two tracks was necessary. What this meant from a production point of view was that a composition needed to be conceived in whole mentally before writing to the sequencer. Another restriction was the amount of notes that the Q-Disks (A style of floppy disc) could hold, limiting a track to 18,000 notes. When first starting out I couldn't have imagined exceeding this, however as more MIDI manipulation was introduced so the note count increased; this led to compositions of a maximum of eleven minutes with limited MIDI manipulation and seven minutes for heavily effected tracks.

Roland E-36

In 1994 I brought a Roland E-36 synthesizer, intended as a single sound source; it would also eventually act as a motherboard to the Quasimidi Quasar. Although the sounds were a little limited from the control panel the instruments presets were somewhat impressive for home orientated keyboard. The only drawback was the limit to the range of sounds and manipulation allowed within performance; without a computer, editing MIDI from a hardware sequencer proved difficult.

When listening to the demonstration song you get the impression that this keyboard is aimed at the pop composer rather than a dance music writer. However the tracks that were created using this synthesizer always drifted to the more obscure styles of electronic dance music.