Roland V-Stage 76

How does Roland’s V‑Stage fare against the other big red stage keyboards in town?

This isn’t the first time that Roland have dipped their toes into the warm waters of piano‑plus‑organ‑plus‑synth keyboards. But this large, red and black slab is clearly aimed at a specific market dominated by another large, red and black slab of stage keyboard. So... how will it fare?

Overview

There are two V‑Stage models, and I was offered my choice of the smaller version with a 76‑key semi‑weighted waterfall keybed, or the larger one featuring an 88‑key piano action with escapement. On this occasion, I opted for the smaller model because the pre‑release blurb revealed that it offers channel aftertouch, which the larger doesn’t. Unfortunately, as I’ll explain later, this didn’t turn out quite as I had expected.

The layout is attractive, but the pitch‑bend and modulation wheels plus the Leslie fast/slow and brake controls (all of which can be assigned additional functions) are positioned behind the keyboard. I’ve stated my dislike for this arrangement before, and I’ll do so again. How would you feel if the whammy bar of one of your guitars was moved to save space or to satisfy some other design purpose? You’d not be happy.

There are four instrument sections revealed on the panel: organ, acoustic pianos, electric pianos and dual synthesizers. Ignoring the organ for a moment, you can play the instruments in each of these sections across the whole width of the keyboard or either side of its own split point, choosing the octave transposition for each so that sounds sit comfortably in their chosen ranges. In contrast, you can create three ranges in the organ section using two user‑defined split points. These correspond to the upper and lower manuals plus bass pedals of a typical organ and, in addition to playing them on the V‑Stage itself, you can play them using an additional MIDI keyboard and MIDI bass pedals. Three buttons in the organ section then allow you to select which registration the drawbars are controlling at any given moment. Unfortunately, offering splits rather than ranges means that, while you can layer sections, you can’t have, say, an organ in the lowest three octaves, a piano and pad layered in the middle two, and a solo synth at the top. While I’m not proposing workstation‑like facilities, it’s a shame that Roland have limited the V‑Stage in this fashion. On a more positive note, you can choose whether each section transmits to an external sound engine, either in parallel with or instead of the internal sound generation.

The sounds generated by each section are created from building blocks called Tones. To construct a sound, you choose the Tone you want, adjust the available parameters and then — with the exception of the acoustic pianos, which has none — apply the dedicated effects units within each section. Their outputs then pass to three Total Effects — an MFX (multi‑effects unit) followed by a delay/chorus and a reverb. There are two routes through these. The first mixes the outputs from all of the sound generators and then passes the signal to the MFX, the delay and the reverb in series. The second applies the MFX to the output of just one sound generator, and then passes the output from this plus user‑defined amounts of each of the other sections through the delay and reverb in parallel or in series, or a bit of both. Roland have used variations of this architecture many times before, and it’s one of those occasions when it’s harder to describe something than it is to use it.

Finally, there’s a Master section comprising a global EQ and a compressor, the combination of which can be useful when dealing with dodgy PAs and inexperienced sound engineers. But if you want any of the sound generators to bypass the Total and Master effects, you also have the choice of sending their sounds to the ‘dry’ sub outputs.

The resulting setup (with the exception of the Master effects, which are saved as system settings) is called a Scene. There are 512 Scene memories, and you can create up to eight chains of these, each containing up to 128 Scenes. There’s also a facility called EX Scene, which offers eight slots. These auto‑save the Scenes within them as you edit, which could save your bacon (or your sanity) if you’re fine tuning your sounds and something untoward happens.

But hang on a moment. Where do you save your edited Tones? I could edit sounds and rename them, but nowhere was there an option to save them. So I saved a modified Tone within a spare Scene, and that seemed to work. But there was still no mention of it anywhere within the Tone lists. What’s more, when I moved away from that Scene and later returned to it, the new name had disappeared to be replaced by the original. The modified sound had survived, but there was nothing to tell me where and what it was. Once I had saved a few of these, it became almost impossible to locate them again.

So I contacted Roland, whose product specialist told me, “We wanted the V‑Stage to be a quicker user experience, and we have had feedback in the past that our usual method of saving can be a bit time‑consuming because the user has to save all edited Tones individually, then the Scene. So to simplify things on the V‑Stage, everything is saved within the Scene; when you write a Scene, all the Tone information is saved along with all of the Scene data.” I understand this, but I think that this system is — to put it kindly — crap. Is it really so mind‑bending to save a Tone in a Tone list so that you can later include it in any Scenes you wish? In my view, Roland’s engineers have tried to fix a problem that doesn’t exist and, in doing so, introduced the problem that they claimed to have eliminated.

The V‑Stage 76 measures 1181 x 342 x 109mm and weighs in at 15.2kg. The larger 88‑note version measures 1331 x 353 x 143mm and weighs 21.8kg.

The Organs

The V‑Stage seeks to emulate four Categories of organ: Hammond tonewheel, Vox Continental, Farfisa Compact, and pipe. Within each category, there are then four Types that provide the building blocks of the sound, and no fewer than 23 pages of parameters to help you sculpt it. These include a flexible overdrive plus a dedicated delay and reverb. There’s also Roland’s latest rotary speaker effect, but despite being able to obtain some pleasing Leslie emulations from this, I couldn’t persuade it to produce the deep ‘whoompf’ that you obtain from the real thing.

As you would expect, the organ panel echoes that of a Hammond organ, and it controls the latest version of the Virtual Tonewheel sound generator found in the Fantom series. With four underlying tonewheel Types called Vintage 1, Vintage 2, Solid and Clean (although nowhere does the documentation tell you what these...