My Third Synth, Roland XP-50

Around 1996, while I was in Provo UT attending college at BYU, one of my friends, Nathan, formed a band with some of his friends called Piper Down. It went through several incarnations including various drummers, singers, and musicians before finally disbanding in 1998 or so. My friend Nathan invited me to join the band as he was exiting. The previous keyboard player switched to Nathan's role of bass player and I took over on keyboards.

Since I was now performing regularly with a band, I needed something impressive to play on. First, I purchased a digital piano. It was the Roland FP-1, a full-sized 88-key hammer-action digital piano. When I bought it, I asked for something that had no whistles and bells, but just a great piano sound. Also, it needed to be portable for gigging. While the FP-1 was an excellent machine for piano, I needed something else to use for all my other sound needs.

I went to several music stores and decided upon the Roland XP-50. This time I wanted all the bells and whistles. So I got not just a synthesizer, but a workstation. The Xp-50 came with a 16 track sequencer, a disk drive, and tons and tons of sounds. Plus I bought an expansion ROM card entitled "Keyboards of the 60s & 70s" that had tons of Electric Pianos (a la Supertramp), Organs (a la Doors), and Mellotrons (a la Moody Blues.) The synth had room for two expansions boards, I debated endlessly over what to get for the second ROM. I probably would have ended up getting the "Vintage Synth" board, but I also really wanted a good Harpsichord sound which I didn't have on either the XP-50 or FP-1.

Anyway, I got some pretty good use out of the synthesizer for playing live with the band. If I didn't want to drag my large digital piano with me to gigs or practices, the piano sounds on the XP-50 would cover for me. However, outside of live playing, I never did get much more use out of the machine. I admit I was both intimidated and frustrated by the machine. I never used the on-board sequencer which seemed to difficult to program in place, and the limited amount of effects meant that all those rich sounds on the machine lost most of their flavor when going into multi-timbral mode for sequencing. After I left the band, the keyboard mostly sat unused except for occasional tinkering here and there. Finally, at a moment when we were struggling to pay some bills, I reluctantly parted ways with the synthesizer through eBay hoping it would go to someone who could get more use out of it.

Today I really regret parting ways with the machine. I felt like I never really got to know it or understand it as well as I could have. My new found interest in synthesizers coupled with better software capability for recording multi-track audio means I could now get lots of use out of the keyboard without having to sacrifice the great on-board effects.

Anyway, here's some links to some XP-50 resources:

• Vintage Synth's XP-50 page
• Roland's old XP-50 page
• Another Roland page for the XP-50's big brother, XP-80.
• Some pages on the available expansion boards