Roland Studio Canvas SD-50
This is a bit of an unusual one.
The story behind this is that a friend of mine has a covers band. I often used help them with their sound and lights, and he would always ask me for gear recommendations. Several years ago, their keyboard player had a reasonable keyboard synth, but it didn’t really have a couple of sounds they needed. In particular, they were after something which gave them the synth sound from Van Halen’s “Jump”.
I did a bit of research and recommended this synth module: it could plug into his existing keyboard via MIDI, it had a pretty good Jump synth sound, as well as a range of decent electric piano sounds that they liked, and a second-hand one could be bought reasonably cheaply off eBay.
So they bought it and used it for a few years until the keyboard player left the band. They got a new keyboard player and he had a newer keyboard that had all the sounds they need so it got stuck in a cupboard.
A few years later when he was clearing out his cupboard, my friend found this and asked me if I wanted it, for free. He couldn’t be bothered to eBay it, and he thought I would have some fun with it.
So that’s how I ended up with it.
It’s basically a MIDI GS Synth module, but it also has a bunch of other goodies in it too. For instance, you can plug a USB stick containing MIDI tracks into it and play them. You could use this, for instance, for backing tracks (although, being MIDI backing tracks, they might be a bit cheesy).
It’s USB powered, but can also run off batteries or a power supply so you can use it independently of a computer as a synth module connected to a MIDI keyboard.
If you do connect it to a computer, it supports USB MIDI both as a MIDI synth, and as a MIDI I/O device, so you can use it as a MIDI interface for your computer. It also has an audio capture input that is switchable between mic or instrument, so you can use it as an audio interface. It has a Hi-Z setting so you can jack a guitar directly into it, and I have done this in the past. It doesn’t have any amp emulation so you need to do that in software.
It’s quite old in terms of synthesizer technology and it doesn’t have any patch editing capability other than basic add-on effects like chorus and reverb. These days, for many of the patches you are better off using software synths or samplers, but it does have some great sounds; the piano and drum patches are very good, coming from the Roland digital piano and vDrum series.
If anyone is interested, here’s a Youtube video of someone exploring some of the sounds:
I really don’t use it much because, as I say, it’s usually more convenient and often better to just use software synth plugins these days, but I do occasionally have a play with it or find a use for it. One of the more interesting capabilities it has is that the output from the synth can be configured to appear on the USB bus as an audio input. That means you can play a MIDI track to it and capture the resulting audio output directly just using a USB cable. Not that many modern synths do that.
Cheers,
Keith