SuperNatural Acoustic

[Fleer]

I wonder which SuperNatural Acoustic sounds are included apart from pianos.
SuperNatural Strings apparently, but which else?

[FGM]

https://www.roland.com/uk/support/by_pr ... 7310e7d74/

For me, ZEN-Core tones are huge and second to none. Set each as you want. Four partials at the composer disposal. Terrific.

[Fleer]

Thanks. Already got Zen-Core in my RD-88.
Looking forward to those SuperNatural acoustic instruments in the FA-0.

[anotherscott]

For me, ZEN-Core tones are huge and second to none.

SuperNATURAL Acoustic tones incorporate modeling, making them capable of things that are not possible within Zen-core tones.

[neomad]

Absolutely in agreement with AnotherScott. Zen Core is powerful, but despite some nuances, not blow-minding to my ears (having a FA07 and VA is more than decent). But Supernatural acoustic is amazing

[FGM]

Won't say they are not great, but even then they are not much configurable, at least in Fantom. And since matching the orchestration to my needs is a must, via the envelopes, it turns out they are hardly my first choice, remaining a curious option that remains precisely just as that, a mere curiosity.

I think perhaps they might have been provided with a higher capability in other hardware for their configuration based on Lazerlike42 opinion on the matter:

viewtopic.php?p=334030#p334030

"Even some of the SN stuff they do have on the Fantom is apparently hampered. For example, the acoustic and electric pianos seem to have almost all of their parameters and some of the "nuances" to the sounds removed as compared to implementations in other products."

[PauloF]

I've been checking the SN-A list for the Fantom-0, and despite having only 70 Tones + 30 AC Pianos + 36 Electric Pianos and 25 Instruments, they seem to be a good representation of this special types of tones, except... the Acoustic guitar ones, that are completely missing...

hummm... I think I'll miss those ones. rats...
;-)

[anotherscott]

I've been checking the SN-A list for the Fantom-0, and despite having only 70 Tones + 30 AC Pianos + 36 Electric Pianos and 25 Instruments, they seem to be a good representation of this special types of tones, except... the Acoustic guitar ones, that are completely missing...

As I understand it...

The number of "tones" is somewhat arbitrary. In many cases, they are the same modeled SuperNATURAL Acoustic Instruments just with things like different EQ and effects. So the 70 tones you mention are the program variations created from the 25 instrument models you mentioned, listed here:



The 30 AC pianos are program variations of the 2 modeled pianos.

The 36 EPs appear to be variations of 3 modeled Rhodes: a Mk I, a Mk II, and a 1975. All the selectable tones seem to be variations of one of those three, differing mostly by which effects they put on them.

So there appear to be a total of 30 SuperNATURAL Acoustic instruments in the board... the 25 shown in the image above, two acoustic pianos, and 3 Rhodes EPs.

By contrast, the FA appears to have:
(1) acoustic piano
(4) Rhodes, seemingly a different selection from the Fantom... they are shown as a 1975, a 1976, a 1981, and a Dyno model. Though it's not impossible that some are different names for the same model (i.e. the 1981 could be the same as the Mk II, the 1976 could be the Mk I... it would be interesting to hear from someone who had both boards, whether the basic no-effect versions of these various sounds seem identical or different on the two boards)
(1) Wurli (reed) EP
(1) Clavinet
(1 or 2) acoustic bass
(1 or 2) electric bass
(1?) acoustic guitar
(2) ensemble strings sounds (based on having the same set of associated tones that the Fantom has)
+ the SuperNATURAL organ, but that has been superseded by the better sounding VTW

So if you were to move from the FA to the Fantom, in terms of SuperNATURAL Acoustic instruments, you'd lose the Wurli, the Clav, the acoustic guitar, and the acoustic bass; and the Rhodes selection is different. OTOH, you gain a second acoustic piano, harp, (2) violin, viola, (2) cello, contrabass, erhu, (2) trumpet, trombone, oboe, clarinet, (2) bagpipes, piccolo, pan flute, (3) sax, choir (and probably some different Rhodes).

If you got an Integra-7, I believe you'd have all of the above except the new second acoustic piano, and you'd also have a lot of others that are in neither the FA nor Fantom.

[Lazerlike42]

I've been checking the SN-A list for the Fantom-0, and despite having only 70 Tones + 30 AC Pianos + 36 Electric Pianos and 25 Instruments, they seem to be a good representation of this special types of tones, except... the Acoustic guitar ones, that are completely missing...

As I understand it...

The number of "tones" is somewhat arbitrary. In many cases, they are the same modeled SuperNATURAL Acoustic Instruments just with things like different EQ and effects. So the 70 tones you mention are the program variations created from the 25 instrument models you mentioned, listed here:



The 30 AC pianos are program variations of the 2 modeled pianos.

The 36 EPs appear to be variations of 3 modeled Rhodes: a Mk I, a Mk II, and a 1975. All the selectable tones seem to be variations of one of those three, differing mostly by which effects they put on them.

So there appear to be a total of 30 SuperNATURAL Acoustic instruments in the board... the 25 shown in the image above, two acoustic pianos, and 3 Rhodes EPs.

By contrast, the FA appears to have:
(1) acoustic piano
(4) Rhodes, seemingly a different selection from the Fantom... they are shown as a 1975, a 1976, a 1981, and a Dyno model. Though it's not impossible that some are different names for the same model (i.e. the 1981 could be the same as the Mk II, the 1976 could be the Mk I... it would be interesting to hear from someone who had both boards, whether the basic no-effect versions of these various sounds seem identical or different on the two boards)
(1) Wurli (reed) EP
(1) Clavinet
(1 or 2) acoustic bass
(1 or 2) electric bass
(1?) acoustic guitar
(2) ensemble strings sounds (based on having the same set of associated tones that the Fantom has)
+ the SuperNATURAL organ, but that has been superseded by the better sounding VTW

So if you were to move from the FA to the Fantom, in terms of SuperNATURAL Acoustic instruments, you'd lose the Wurli, the Clav, the acoustic guitar, and the acoustic bass; and the Rhodes selection is different. OTOH, you gain a second acoustic piano, harp, (2) violin, viola, (2) cello, contrabass, erhu, (2) trumpet, trombone, oboe, clarinet, (2) bagpipes, piccolo, pan flute, (3) sax, choir (and probably some different Rhodes).

If you got an Integra-7, I believe you'd have all of the above except the new second acoustic piano, and you'd also have a lot of others that are in neither the FA nor Fantom.

There's now Wurlitzer in there, really? The choices they make in terms of what they are including tone-wise really do baffle me, at least when you're talking about their flagship product. Why would you make a flagship that only has a selection of your best stuff? I could even understand it if the Fantom-0s skipped some of the stuff, but not the regular Fantom.

Is a flagship really a flagship if it's missing basic stuff (e.g., the Wurlitzer)?

[anotherscott2022]

It has Wurlis, but it does not have their SuperNATURAL Wurli. How much of a loss that is is open to debate. ;-)

[Lazerlike42]

It has Wurlis, but it does not have their SuperNATURAL Wurli. How much of a loss that is is open to debate. ;-)

That may be true from the perspective of consumers who may disagree on how good the SN tones are, but from Roland's perspective SN has been their big thing. I suppose one might even argue whether they might move away from the SN stuff in favor of Zen-core, but at least thus far they have heavily pushed the SN engines in their marketing for the Fantoms as though this is still their top of the line sound engine, so leaving stuff out still seems incongruous to me.

[DNGmaestro]

This is so absurd.

Roland crippling their products for no reason whatsoever. The Jupiter 80 and the Integra are more than 10 years old. No reason to exclude supernatural tones from the new keyboards and i'm including the v-drums on the integra.
I don't even think they're planning on putting the full collection of sounds available, like the acoustic, electric and distorted guitars, drums, all pianos, e.pianos, exotic instruments and all others at a later date.

Roland is my favorite electronic instrument music company but this move is just a disgrace.

[Lazerlike42]

This is so absurd.

Roland crippling their products for no reason whatsoever. The Jupiter 80 and the Integra are more than 10 years old. No reason to exclude supernatural tones from the new keyboards and i'm including the v-drums on the integra.
I don't even think they're planning on putting the full collection of sounds available, like the acoustic, electric and distorted guitars, drums, all pianos, e.pianos, exotic instruments and all others at a later date.

Roland is my favorite electronic instrument music company but this move is just a disgrace.

I've always been a Roland person but I might be going Yamaha (or maybe someone else, but probably Yamaha) right now because of this. I've spent a few weeks researching intensely and my conclusion is that at the mid-tier range of Fantom-0 or Modx, and possibly at the flagship range of Fantom or Montage, Roland has by far the better hardware, the better interface, workflow, even expandability, etc., BUT ultimately they have the worse "software." That's been the way it is with technology since the start of the computer age: software always wins. You can have the best hardware in the world but if the competitor has software that people actually want to run, they'll get most people's money. At least in my case, I really want to go the Roland route because I love what they're put together in terms of hardware, but the sounds that are included are just miles behind the competition as far as I can hear.

[anotherscott2022]

they have heavily pushed the SN engines in their marketing for the Fantoms as though this is still their top of the line sound engine

I don't see it that way. Remember, when the Fantom first came out it had no SuperNATURAL sounds whatsoever, and none were mentioned as forthcoming. So it was not initially marketed as SN at all, that's all been added later (along with lots of other stuff). The first were the strings and brass that came in update 1.5, then the first piano/EP in 1.6, and then a downloadable second piano was added earlier this year.

so leaving stuff out still seems incongruous to me.

Roland crippling their products for no reason whatsoever....this move is just a disgrace.

Another possibility: Remember, "SuperNATURAL" is a catch-all phrase for things that incorporate modeling. From that perspective, it's not a single engine, each modeled instrument can involve unique parameters and behaviors. Essentially, each modeled instrument (or at least family of instrument) can be considered its own sound engine. For an extreme example of this, the predecessor to the VTW organ was the SuperNATURAL tonewheel organ, which probably has about zero programming in common with the SuperNATURAL piano or whatever. So in that respect, it could be very different from, for example, the XV-5080 emulation, where they could have loaded in one sample set along with maybe a master conversion table of XV-5080-to-Zencore parameter mapping, and bingo, loading in 1000 XV-5080 sounds is no more work than loading in 10. Rather, it's possible that each SN instrument could have to be manually re-implemented for the new architecture, one by one. (Which also means, who knows, maybe over time, most if not all the Integra SN Acoustic instruments do get converted. OTOH, it's also not inconceivable that, for whatever reason, some of the Integra SuperNATURAL Acoustic instruments cannot be successfully converted to the Fantom architecture.)

There is actually evidence of this if you look at the update history, which also list the bugs that they fix along the way. Some bugs only affected SN instruments, or even only a specific one. This further supports the idea that these SN implementations are programmatically distinct and separate from non-SN sounds and from each other. e.g.:

1.51 - "When using Master Key Shift, the pitch of SuperNATURAL Acoustic sounds fails to be set correctly."
3.00 - "The timing of sound production for SN-A tones is sometimes irregular."
3.00 - "With SN-A tones, tones in the E.BASS category cannot be muted smoothly."

[anotherscott2022]

At least in my case, I really want to go the Roland route because I love what they're put together in terms of hardware, but the sounds that are included are just miles behind the competition as far as I can hear.

It really depends on the sounds. (And of course, it's also somewhat subjective.) When it comes to straight PCM sampled instruments, the Yamaha architecture does have a technical advantage, in supporting many more available sonic components per sound (Yamaha calls them Elements, Roland calls them Partials), and Yamaha has the FM engine which, naturally, gives it better FM sounds. OTOH, Roland has the technical advantage in virtual analog synthesis, tonewheel organ emulation, and in the modeling capabilities of the SuperNATURAL Acoustic tones.

But I'd also suggest that sounds may not be the most important differentiator. You can always add sounds. Both the MODX and Fantom-0 are excellent at letting you incorporate, for example, sounds from an iPad into your sound combinations about as easily as if they were built-in sounds, and that's a way to get a wider range of high quality orchestral instruments into your Roland, or a way to get VA synthesis or a tonewheel organ engine into your MODX. So if both instruments at least had "good enough" built in sounds for the bulk of your work, you could make the argument that it is the differences in features, workflow, ergonomics, action, etc. that are more important.