Modification

[Don Ronaldo]

Hello,

I´m new member of the roland clan forum. I bought myself a fantom g 8 and a Vsynth GT(2) some years ago and spent quite some time reading the different (frustrating..) topics on the G8 section concerning support, extensions, etc..

After purchasing the fantastic piano samples (fantomgsounds.com) I thought about to develop a flash-expansion (some 2-4 GBytes) for the G on my own, since I´m not willing to wait for Roland to come up with it. What do you think about this idea?

Regards

AL

[G-Man]

I think that could be very nice, but is that possible?
We all know that the Fantom only takes 1Gb of RAM and ARX expansions...
I guess that the guys at Yamaha will have a heart attack if they see this ;))

[Don Ronaldo]

Hello G-Man. Not easy, but possible. It requires modifications on hard-& software (most likely..). Not easy, bit possible,

[G-Man]

Hi there, Don Ronaldo.
Well if that's the case (it requires hardware modifications), it's unlikely that guys who don't know how to mess with the Fantom's hardware can benefit by such improvement. And I don't, to be quite honest :)
The software part would be easier, because it would be only a matter of installation.
Anyway, the G is not bad as it is right now; I would like to see Roland releasing the promised ARX boards.
It would be the first time in history when the promises about expansion are not fulfilled.

[Don Ronaldo]

Thats true. Maybe it's not that difficult but i's to early to explain this in detail. I'll first have a look on the memory adress organization. Later more on that. Btw.. what promised expansions (ARX) do you mean?

[G-Man]

Btw.. what promised expansions (ARX) do you mean?

Well, if you take a look at the Owner's Manual at the Input FX routing for example, you can see things like "output thru ARX1 / ARX 2 - available only if the selected expansion board supports audio input".
Or, at the Studio Mode chapter, it says "up to 16 parts - depending on the expansion board".
So we're supposed to have reasons to believe that some day we will see an ARX card with it's own 16 independent parts, and/or that supports audio input (for sampling purposes, I assume).
If none of this will ever happen, I think that Roland would be in a bad situation, like never before - the previous expansion series, SR-JV 80 and SRX, were both completed.
In 4 years since the G was released, we've only seen 3 expansion cards, and the last one was released more than 3 years ago. Funnily enough, neither the G or ARX was discontinued yet, so we have to keep guessing.
Interesting though how only the G7 was discontinued, probably to make room for the JP-80.

[Don Ronaldo]

Understand your point. Personally I don't believe, that there will be new ARX-Extensions released by Roland. They designed the G to carry max. 2 of them and for a marketing driven company the G-concept was most likely a (commercial) flop. I really like this maschine a lot and the audio-quality is superb. It seems that an update of the OS will not pay back for Roland. There are excellent sounds available on the market but it takes to long to boot the G and load hundreds of megabytes, so the only thing I'm really missing is flash ram.

[G-Man]

Yes they did release the G only with 2 slots, but if the ARX series get's that powerful as they "promised", 2 of them would be more than enough. If each ARX would have 16 parts, you could get 16 parts internal + 16 parts ARX 1 + 16 parts ARX 2 + 16 parts external. That would be a total of 64 independent parts, as powerful as Cubase SX! Add the 24 tracks of stereo audio and 128 of midi. Such power in a keyboard workstation would be unrivaled - by far. But, just like you say, most likely we will never see that happening.
However I don't know if the Jupiter 80 will sell like hot cakes compared to the Fantom G; for me at least it's not too attractive.
I guess that we should rely on you for that flash RAM expansion ;)
BTW you were saying in another post that Roland hardware is first class compared to Korg and such - and you were saying it as an electronic engineer. Did you run some tests or checked things out in detail and reached to that conclusion, or it's just a result of interacting with these products, like for many of us?

[dark_knight_x3]

Good question G-Man. : )

I saw i the korg forum doing some hacking with his kronos.. Seems like its an Intel Atom chip, with an intel board, connected to a korg proprietary board i guess.

The FG.. Im not sure how their electronic design exceeds the Kronos.

And now that we have an EE member here, what can he say about reverse engineering the FG's OS? Have updates of our own.. I would imagine that it would be very hard.. Glad we now have an engineer willing to analyze this beast of a board we have. ;)

[Don Ronaldo]

Hello G-Man. I'm absolutely shure that the Jupiter 80 will sell like hot cakes compared to the FG although the market has changed quite a lot since the 80. I think, that the Jupiter 80 actually is what VSynth and FG should have been. To build a sequencer on a IPAD is for shure much smater than to mimic a PC in a hardware keyboard. On the other hand a excellent audio I/O combined with a roland keybed will never be replaced by a touchscreen (thats what I hope..,). FG is a rompler and sampler and therefore limited by memory.
dark_night_x3: Honestly said, the kronos electronics design is very cheap -especially compared to the Oasys. I dont know how they managed to get that sound out of it. Very efficient.... I'm quite shure that it's just a super low cost version of Oasys. Korg just starts to make money after investing so much ressources into Oasys. Btw: that's smart as well....
Obviously, the FG will be much harder to hack with all that custom chips. But compared to a PS2 this will be fun. Anyway I dont think to add screens or such thing - just learn the FG to accept the memory.

[G-Man]

The sequencer is not an issue on the G if you're a reasonable keyboard player. I know that there is this "pros" fever now, with detailed midi event editing bla bla... But if you're in a band and went to a studio for recording, everything is captured as audio, thus there is no midi editing. And the G gives you all needed for manipulating quantization, velocities etc. But you work into one environment, and this is a lot more consistent. Not to say that I don't use the computer at all, I do, but the main "workhorse" is the G.
I would doubt about the fact that the JP 80 will sell way better than G, because it's almost as expensive as G8, but it doesn't have the piano keys, no sequencer, no sampler, no expansions on it. Except for the sound architecture advantage wich is arguable, it offers less for the same (large) amount of money.

[Don Ronaldo]

G-Man. Obviously you're right. I dont criticise the G at all. I'm just saying that the nice GUI (not audio hardware) today could very easily be adressed to the IPAD and software maintenance would be many times cheaper that way. I assume, that if Roland would start with the development today, the G would look differently. What would you think about the Jupiter with sampling and the G's sequencer? Anyway they made a very good job the time they developed it. They just released it to early. I'm pretty shure that they are scared by the massive amount of negative posts -especially on the roland clan forum - and that Roland dont really want to lose customers. We must not forget too that japanese people have a sligthly different stile....
I'm not a professional musician but spent 10 years with studying piano and accordeon. I'm interested in the technology and am listening to what people discuss on this and other platforms. More non volatile RAM could help to compensate most of the disadvantages compared to the compeditors. Why not using one ARX-slot to install a SSD? Just use the ARX slot as a disk controller. €200 and the costs of the SSD? I would buy instantly... Again: more RAM (and some bugs in the OS sorted out) and the G is back to business. I honestly hope that Roland continues on that, since so many people rely on them.

My expensive hobby:
FG8, VSynthGT, JX8P, JV1010 and an old SH101 (first one love it...), DELLPrecision 4500 and lots of plugs

[Leh173]

It's funny the G is pretty good at version 1.5 and only has a few niggles, ie a better editor to move assets between projects should have been made, a more flexible FX structure and it would be done for me. Niceties would have been some more ARX cards, say a Piano and an Organ and a Flash one. The flash one would have been a good idea. Yamaha are on the right track with the XF in that regard. Other than that the Fantom G has lot of power. I'm actually surprised how much I can pull out of this thing!

I think Roland probably were developing the SuperNatural technology as they were developing the G and maybe they had bigger plans for the ARX series, but then maybe they decided to focus their resources in the new platform which is the Jupiter. Who knows maybe even the Jupiter technology was meant to be in the G but they got delayed... If they do make another workstation, a Fantom with the Jupiter sound engine, flash memory for the sampling and an improved file structure would be brilliant.

BTW re your earlier comment about the hardware of the G, the electronics engineer that works on all my boards says the Roland (and nord) keyboards are very well designed from a hardware perspective. He also said he could live without ever having to open up another korg...

[Don Ronaldo]

Hello Leh173. I spent quite some time to analyze different gears in the past and beliefe, that those designers at Roland really love their jobs. To me it seems that they try to equal the grand senior which is good to keep the product quality on the highest level. I'm quite sure that they will solve the G's shortcomings as soon as they allowe some fresh blood within their descision processes.

In some posts I read, that the marketing managers at Roland are the talented ones, but I believe that rather the other thing is true. It's maybe as well some sort of generation conflict. The Jupiter 80 will not help the G owners but is a good sign that Roland is back on the right track.

I'll welcome fresh blood (and SSD of course..)

[Leh173]

Yes I think they are interested in creating beautiful musical instruments. I was a actually a little blown away by the industrial design of the G and when I got one it looked like a machine that had been crafted by someone who really cared. The same for the V-Synth and Jupiter. They are appealing keyboards to play, unlike some other modern keyboards that look like they could have been designed in 1991. For the G a bit more work on it's OS was needed. Perhaps it was launched too soon? But for me it's irrelevant as I bought it later and the OS was more mature.

I think you may be right about a shift at Roland. They certainly seem to be drawing a line in the sand with the Jupiters. I've been watching the development of this series and I have to say the 2.0 update impressed me a lot. It seemed the really listened to their customers. I remember when the Jupiter was launched and people were commenting that the FX routing should be more flexible, they said something like "we didn't do it as it would introduce other problems" and a year later they did it, so hats off to them. Instruments in this class should be flexible, even if it was not the designers original intent. Sure, make it work they way they want, but also include options for the user to do other things. They seem to have realised that. Also the iPad apps and all that show a positive direction as well.

I would imagine they know what the issues with the G are, but have decided they needed to move on and perhaps allocating resources to the G was seen as effort better spent elsewhere. Not so good for us as the Fantom G is a good instrument that could use a couple of tweaks...

In any case I'd imagine they haven't left the Fantom concept behind just yet... It's a good idea. Out of all the workstations (and I'm not a workstation guy) it's the only one ever made that appealed to me. That's why I bought it!