Roland V-Piano

The forefather of almost all of these was the Kurzweil K250. At around £12,000, this offered a sample-based piano patch that had many players drooling even though few could ever hope to afford the basic model. The philosophy behind the K250 and its descendents is really rather simple. In short, some or all of the notes on a real piano are sampled multiple times with, say, one sample being the sound of a soft piano note, the next being a somewhat harder mezzoforte, the next being a good solid forte, and the last being the fff thump of a weightlifter having a bad day. These are then allocated to MIDI velocity ranges with, say, the piano sample being replayed in the range 032, the mezzoforte sample being replayed from 3364, and so on. Sometimes, there’s a bit of trickery invoked to try to smooth the transitions between layers but, if you listen to almost any modern digital piano, you can hear the individual samples quite distinctly. The skill with which the manufacturer masks these discontinuities and disguises any obvious loops as long notes decay determines the quality of the instrument.

Fortunately, as far back as 1986, one company adopted a different approach. They were Roland, and the flagship of their new piano range was the RD-1000, a hefty instrument that, unlike the K250, had no pretensions to being anything other than a generator of piano sounds. It was based on a new technology that Roland called SAS, or Structured Adaptive Synthesis. This was an early incarnation of what we now call resynthesis and, although its sounds were derived from samples, these were analysed by a computer (named Sally, if my memory serves me correctly) and broken down into harmonic structures. These structures were then interpolated between velocities so that there was a continuous, smooth transition as you played from MIDI velocity 1 to 127. What’s more, there were none of the unpleasant transitions from one discrete sample to the next as you played up and down the keyboard. And finally, there were no loops when notes were held for a long time, so Roland’s pianos side-stepped the dreaded “Boing... Naaahh” that ruined many of their competitors.

Offering three acoustic pianos, two electric pianos, a clavinet, a harpsichord and a vibraphone, SAS was fabulous, and pianists found Roland’s RD- and HP- ranges to be the first genuinely playable and expressive digital pianos. Sitting on its large, U-shaped stand, the RD-1000 also looked great and, despite a heavyweight price tag, it soon appeared on stage in the company of many of the biggest acts of the time.

Unfortunately, Roland were seduced by the dark side and, in the 1990s, the company migrated to a sample-based piano engine. Although the underlying tone of this was more realistic than before, and advances such as layering samples to imitate sympathetic resonance and soundboard resonance became possible, audible sample discontinuities appeared for the first time on Roland’s digital pianos. Maybe audiences were fooled by these new sounds, but they were often less satisfying for the performer because the ‘touch’ was wrong. Real pianos do not exhibit abrupt changes in timbre as you play. Perhaps Roland thought this a price worth paying, but I have continued to use my SAS modules in preference to anything that has appeared since. Until now.

However, even when you’ve read the manual from cover to cover (as I have), the underlying voicing structure of the V-Piano is not obvious. That’s because it’s not explained. On the contrary, Roland’s literature appears to be deliberately confusing. There appear to be just two building blocks: one called the Vintage Piano, and the other called the Vanguard Piano, although there may in fact be variations on each of these. As its name suggests, the Vintage Piano is a model that combines elements derived from analysing revered pianos such as... well, Roland doesn’t say, but they’re vintage ones, apparently. In contrast, the Vanguard Piano doesn’t exist; it’s a model with three strings per note across its whole range, and Tones built upon it are noticeably different from those based upon the Vintage model.

Ah yes, Tones. There are 24 preset factory Tones — 14 based upon the Vintage model and 10 based upon the Vanguard model — and you can save up to 100 user Tones that you create by editing them. The next level up is called a Setup, and this combines a Tone with various performance settings. You can save up to 100 of these, too. Finally, there are the system parameters — keyboard response, temperament, output modes, V-Link parameters and so on — that affect the instrument as a whole, no matter which Tone or Setup you select. Some facilities, such as pedal setups and the EQ and ambience settings, can be stored in individual Setups or as system settings.

Inevitably, the parameters that define the nature of a Tone are not ones that you are likely to have encountered elsewhere. Instead of waveforms, filters and amplifiers, there are things such as string width, hammer hardness, and all manner of resonances. If you understand how a piano does what it does, these are intuitive enough, and you should soon be programming properly rather than just tweaking a value to see what happens.

Although you can fully edit the V-Piano using its tiered menu system and LCD display, the sparse front panel makes this a tad fiddly, and it’s much easier to perform detailed editing using the dedicated Mac/PC editor. I installed this on my MacBook running OS X 10.6.1, hooked the two devices together via USB, and the editor ran without further ado. That’s impressive.

On its basic level, you can use the editor to adjust the unison tuning, overall hammer hardness and cross resonance, and somebody has taken great delight in coding whizzy graphics for these functions. You’ll find all its other parameters neatly grouped in the Advanced Tone Edit page, combined into sensible groups and laid out in a way that makes the system simple to understand. This is particularly beneficial when adjusting parameters such as the Tone Colour, Hammer Hardness and Decay Time, each of which has a Velocity Follow parameter that modifies its effect as you play harder or softer. Nevertheless, the greatest benefit is apparent when you attempt to edit any of the eight parameters that you can adjust on a string-by-string basis, or when you want to make a parameter value change smoothly over a range of keys. The only thing that you can’t do is change the model on which the sound is based.

Again, like the RD-1000, moving the V-Piano around and setting it up for use is not for the faint-hearted. It’s not that it’s ridiculously heavy, but it’s big and so it’s awkward, and Roland’s manual insists that, “You must use two or more people to lift the V-Piano onto the stand”. Being a butch and manly kind, I ignored this and removed both units from their huge boxes, assembled the stand on my own, then lifted the V-Piano onto it. Having done so, I can confirm that I would not want to do so on a regular basis! Indeed, it wouldn’t be sensible because, although the KS-V8 complements the piano beautifully, it’s not the most practical stand for stage use. Sure, you can fold it flat, but assembly and disassembly are non-trivial tasks that require you to undo numerous bolts and separate several bits of metalwork. I spent the best part of an hour assembling it for this review and, while I suspect that I would get quicker with practice, it’s going to be impractical for most gigging musicians.

Roland calls the V-Piano’s keybed the PHA-III (Progressive Hammer Action version three) and I understand that the company developed it specifically for the instrument. It’s beautifully balanced, the textured surfaces of the mock-ebony and mock-ivory keys echo those of some grand pianos, and each key has an escapement mechanism that imitates the slightly ‘clicky’ feel of a real piano’s keys. The keyboard in the review model is, of course, brand spanking new, so it plays very evenly, and it will one day be interesting to play a V-Piano that has suffered a few years of unmitigated hammering to see how it has bedded in.

To investigate this, I played the middle ‘C’ on my Broadwood and on the V-Piano. I then repeated the exercise right across the keyboards of both instruments. In every register, the Roland lacked all sorts of ‘stuff’, and I realised that Roland’s factory settings were a little too conservative for my taste. To overcome this, I first tried to identify the resonant frequencies that give my piano its individual character. The V-Piano’s main EQ section offers four bands that can be configured as four peaking EQs or as two peaking EQs flanked by a low and a high shelf and, after some experimentation, I found that a moderate bass boost around 200Hz and a couple of peaks at 1600Hz and 2kHz made all the difference to the timbre. The body was there, and the mid-range now sounded nicer, but the top end was less realistic than it had been before I had started. Wouldn’t it be excellent, I thought, if there were a way to stop the top end from becoming overly bright while retaining the peaky EQ across the whole of the range? Well, there is or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. The tone EQ allows you to insert a single equaliser into each of four user-defined zones, so I selected the notes from C6 upward and rolled off the high end with a broad Q filter. Much better.

I next turned my attention to the envelope of the sound. Pressing the same key on my Broadwood and on the V-Piano showed that the sound of the Roland decayed far more quickly than the sound of the acoustic piano, so I found the Decay Time parameter and extended this almost to its maximum. Then I extended the Damping Time so that notes cut off a little less abruptly when I released the damper pedal.

Now the illusion was becoming convincing, but perhaps the greatest breakthrough occurred when I started to mess around with the parameters of individual notes. My Broadwood is tuned professionally, but there are still notes that are slightly more detuned than others and some that cause strong resonances in the mechanism and case. I decided to replicate some of these anomalies on the V-Piano, using the editor to draw a bit more detune here, some more resonance here, and a clattering, harder hammer over there. The results were remarkable — the imperfections caused the whole thing to come alive, as no other digital piano has done before.

By this point, I was wondering whether a live audience would think that I was playing an acoustic piano or a digital one. To test this, I used the onboard sequencer to record what I was playing, and then sat back to listen. The results were impressive, and my sounds now carried a real suggestion of size, depth and reality. Surprisingly, given their diminutive size, even the hi-fi speakers demonstrated the V-Piano to great effect and, when replayed through these, the factory tones sounded like high quality pianos recorded using expensive microphones in a well-treated studio. To be honest, I suspect that few listeners would have realised that they were listening to a digital recreation of a piano rather than the real thing.

By far the best effect for the player is obtained from two modes that Roland calls Sound Perspective. The first of these, Grand Ambience mode, requires that you place four speakers (Output A L & R, and Output B L & R) in a specific configuration fairly close to the V-Piano. It then biases elements of the sound, such as keying noises and soundboard resonances, toward individual speakers to create much of the illusion of sitting at a real piano. Different but equally impressive, the Dry/Ambience mode directs the dry sound of the V-Piano to the ‘A’ outputs, and a reverberated sound to the ‘B’ outputs. This idea is not new, but the V-Piano performs the trick without the need for external effects boxes and cabling, and it could be superb for chamber performances and domestic use.

Once you’ve learned to edit the V-Piano, you’ll find that it has many additional tricks up its virtual sleeves. For example, you can assign four favourite tones to dedicated buttons and you can lock the front panel so that — apart from adjusting the volume and amount of reverb — you can’t accidentally modify a sound during performance. You can also assign all manner of functions to various buttons, and even more to the continuous controllers masquerading as the soft, sostenuto, FC1 and FC2 pedals. In addition, there are novel performance parameters that go way beyond the usual light/medium/heavy touch-sensitivity of many digital pianos. For example, you can adjust the duration of the short delay that occurs on a real piano between pressing a note and the hammer striking the string, and control how this changes with velocity. There’s also a parameter that emphasises staccato playing. Perhaps irrelevant if your playing never progressed much beyond bashing out 1980s pop songs down the club, but these enhancements will be welcomed by many of the more accomplished players at whom the V-Piano is aimed.

Since the V-Piano will play files held on USB memory, I selected a stick that has some extended MIDI tracks on it and everything behaved as it should. The manual warns that, if you attempt to use very large files, operations other than playback (such as rewind or fast forward) may become unavailable but, despite my best attempts to make something go wrong, I was unable to create a problem.

You can play audio through the dedicated inputs as well as from WAV and MP3 files on memory sticks. I played some WAVs that happened to be sitting on the same stick as the MIDI files mentioned above, and again everything performed as it should. Interestingly, the V-Piano has a karaoke feature in its audio playback system; it can eliminate instruments and voices in the centre of the stereo field. If you have a recording with the piano centred and exhibiting little or no ambience, this allows you to remove it from the track in order to play along.

Firstly, if you insert a pair of headphones into their dedicated socket on the front of the instrument, they don’t defeat the main A and B outputs. I don’t understand the rationale behind this and, if someone at Roland thinks that it’s a good idea, I would at least like to be able to switch between this behaviour and the more conventional response. Secondly, there’s no music stand. If you’re going to plonk a Fantom onto its large, flat upper surface, you won’t even notice the omission, but it could be a real problem for classical musicians and others who expect to be able to use a score. To be honest, I find this astonishing.

On some levels, the V-Piano is a simple instrument; it uses physical modelling to recreate the sound of a range of ‘real’ pianos, and that’s all. There are no Fender Rhodes pianos, no Wurlitzer EP200s, no Yamaha CP80s, no Pianets, no Electrapianos, no Electropianos, nor anything else. Just acoustic pianos.

So, given that it only does one thing, how well does it do it? Certainly, the thing looks gorgeous. It’s big, black, heavy, robust, and stylish. If the Chieftain tank had been designed by Hugo Boss and anodised with a black satin finish, it might have conveyed a similar impression. The keyboard is similarly satisfying. Gone are the slightly unrealistic keys of yesteryear. They have been replaced by ones that not only look but feel like they have a row of hammers sitting behind them.

As for the sound, you have to remember that sample-based pianos are fundamentally flawed. Their building blocks are merely snapshots of the sound, and while manufacturers can invoke clever tricks to ameliorate their limitations, the V-Piano doesn’t suffer from them in the first place. So, while the factory sounds may not grab you at first, the V-Piano rewards careful editing, allowing you to create a range of realistic piano sounds as well as a further range of ‘virtual’ pianos that are, in some ways, even more satisfying than the purely imitative ones. Sure, it never sounds identical to a few hundredweight of rattling wood and iron, but it’s much closer than you might expect, and I would have no hesitation in recommending it for almost every use apart (perhaps) from the most exposed classical requirements.

But there’s one last, unanswered question. Who’s it for? Many classical pianists will be disdainful of the V-Piano, if only because it has some of that new-fangled electrickery stuff lurking around inside it. But what if you’re a serious musician with a few quid stashed away, and you want something that can sound, for all intents and purposes, almost identical to a £60,000 Steinway, even though you don’t have the manpower or enough room in the back of your Ford Transit to lug a nine-foot piano around with you? There are many musicians in this situation who will find the V-Piano to be a more than acceptable substitute, and I have no doubt that Elton John and Paul McCartney will have them built into fake grand piano cases before you can say “Oops, where’s my Bösendorfer?” As for players who want a grand piano on one track, an upright on the next, followed by something that sounds like it has had beer poured down the back for the past 80 years, the V-Piano makes even more sense. Then there are the theatres, concert halls and even music schools who might find the V-Piano to be an excellent compromise between authenticity and convenience. Of course, if you’re the keyboard player in a small band without the luxury of a 7.5-ton truck and a team of roadies, you may discount it because (a) it only does one thing, (b) it’s bloody big, (c) it’s bloody heavy, and (d) it’s hugely bloody expensive. And that’s a shame, because the V-Piano really is rather good at what it does.  0