My next synth, the Roland D-5

The next synth that I owned after the Casio and Kawai from the prior post was the Roland D-5. I was probably around 18 when I got it, but I have very little memories of it. I don't remember buying it, I don't remember getting rid of the Casio to replace it with this, and I don't remember what led me to sell and/or replace it later with another synthesizer. I don't even know for sure if this was the actual model of synthesizer I had. I did quite a bit of detective work just to try and figure out what it was that I had.

What I do remember is that I had a different synthesizer that I brought with me to college. I had it set up along with my Kawai sound module on an X-style keyboard stand with adjustable flip-up arms that held the module over the keyboard. Then I had a 3 foot amp that I often used as a chair to sit on while composing.

At this time I was now using a Mac classic along with newer versions of Cakewalk (as well as Finale Notepad for sheet music, which sadly I almost never used) to do all my sequencing. At some point late in my senior year of high school, the Mac crashed and I lost a ton of music that I'd done. So there's a bit of a gap between the music I did for my high school band Narrow Escape and the music I did in college due to the loss.

To figure out what the keyboard was, I had two blurry pictures that had my keyboard in the background. Neither of them showed the name of the keyboard. However, I could at least confirm that it had what I believe is a signature Roland controller, which is the combo pitch bend/modulation. Most synths have two wheels on the side to control these separately, but Roland combines them into one lever as seen here.

So from that I started searching Roland keyboards for late 80's/early 90's. I found a few different models that could have been the right one, but when I found this manual, it convinced me the D-5 was the one I had:

http://www.soundprogramming.net/manuals/Roland_D-5_PlayManual.pdf

One thing I remembered was that the D-5 had a multi-timbral function which turned the synthesizer into 8 individual synthesizer modules and a rhythm module. Plus it had velocity sensitive keys which made for much more expressive sound. So this replaced my Casio as my main keyboard and drum machine. Aside from drums, I mainly used it for the piano and bass sounds, but I don't particularly remember the more synthy-style sounds being particularly impressive. From what I can tell, this was meant to be a cheaper entry-level keyboard so most of the impressive features of other synths were not to be found here. So no on-board effects, and no on-board sequencer or anything like that. Supposedly there was an apreggiator, but I don't remember that, and probably wasn't interested in it at the time.

Still it had a fairly high polyphony and the multiple, concurrent MIDI channel playback was really what I wanted it for. At the time I had no way to record audio for individual tracks, so I needed everything to play simultaneously. I never really got into the heart of the machine at all, and this was before the Internet was widely available so I had no way of finding other patches for the machine. I believe it had room for a "RAM" card that you could purchase separately for more sounds.

I found a YouTube video with one of the demo songs on the machine. I definitely remember hearing this before.


As I said above, I don't remember getting rid of this keyboard. But I know I didn't use it much after I returned to college from my mission. The last I really remember using it was to set everything up to make some audio recording with a tape recorder of many of the songs I had sequenced on the computer.

Again, those songs can be heard on my Sketchbook music section mainly under "Freshman Music Originals" and "Freshman Music Covers".