Roland to compete at lower end???

I was studying the Roland teaser compilation picture at rolandconnect, and the white keyboard, lower left, looks like it might be a simple piano designed more to compete with the Yamaha P105 and Casio PX-350. I notice that it includes APs - Grand and something that looks like "Early" but might say something entirely different - E. Piano, Strings and Other. In other words, it's likely a reduced-feature-set SN piano. If this is anywhere near a correct interpretation, it might be a very sensible move by Roland.

If this is correct, it can be very insensible move
They are known for certain quality of their pianos, they either need to make it good enough to maintain their brand reputation, and bring up the remainder of the line; do not think that a bad piano would be a desired family addition
But this is just IMO.

i saw the same thing- and commeneted in another thread about it- a few people think it is pictures of existing types of things already.

But- that item in the lower left corner seems to have a smaller footprint in between the keys and buttons.

It really looks to me as if it is a slimmer piano but I guess we will find out Monday.

OT- How are you liking the Krome; do you tend to use it more/less than your Roland FP pianos?
I wonder if Korg would introduce an improved SP170 piano with the Krome sample set- they have all of the ingrediants

I am still debating whether to get the 61 or 88, 61 is less of a hassle for me to put in my car- which is more of an issue

for me than the $550-$600 difference in price.

Whoops, sorry, I missed that.


First gig with the Krome tonight - I'll know more how I like it after that. But I did do a recording session with it the other day and it sounded nice.

One issue I'm having is patch changing. Both the data wheel and the incremental buttons seem oversensitive, and it's easy to overshoot the desired patch - but I expect I'll get used to it - and there's always the number pad as a workaround.

As for the Rolands, for the most part the FP-7F stays home for practice, and the FP-4 is used mainly for jazz gigs - I have a couple of those gigs coming up and am actually looking forward to playing the FP-4 live again. I debated selling the FP-4, but I'm still not convinced there's anything better at a similar weight yet. Maybe next week will bring some surprises...

If it works like the M50, I found that the best thing to do was to create a User Combi bank with all the sounds I needed for a gig on a page or two (16 buttons to a page, if I remember), and then leave the screen in that combi selection mode, so I had quick touchscreen access to all the sounds I needed to get to.

Yes, I started to work on Combis, but there are a limited number of FX possible, and so unless the programs share the same FX, it's a bit limiting. But I need to investigate further.

Those are two different issues: how to structure Combis in terms of fx, and how to quickly change patches. If you're not using Combis yet and are simply trying to find a quick way to switch among Programs, you can create Combis that consist of nothing except those single Programs (no fx issues there). Put 16 of your favorites in the User bank, call up the User bank on screen to see all 16 at once, click on one to start playing it, but don't hit Ok/Enter, just leave it on that screen, and the other 15 are then just a screen tap away (and a second set of 16 is just one more screen tap away). Also, nicely, the "buttons" you need to tap to recall the sounds are all automatically named with what they are, so there's no need for a cheat sheet or remembering a patch number as there would be with the number pad. Anyway, this is all based on how I used the M50, but I assume the Krome has similar functionality.

That sounds very logical, Scott. I'll give it a go. Thanks!