SteveBox
Well-known member
Do you have the Piano or the Button version of the FR1X? Are you saying only the white keys/buttons are misaligned, and the black ones are not? What does that look like?
Roland price drop?
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EuroFolker
Active member
Looks like.... uneven height of the keys??
If the white keys, which are easy to visually check, are not in a perfect straight line - does it really matter if the black keys are?
If it were a button version, I'd be sure to say FR1xb, not FR1x.
If the white keys, which are easy to visually check, are not in a perfect straight line - does it really matter if the black keys are?
If it were a button version, I'd be sure to say FR1xb, not FR1x.
SteveBox
Well-known member
Okay, so the misalignment was with height. Thanks for clarifying. For a button accordion, uneven spacing between buttons could be another type of misalignment.
Mike K
Active member
What are the other choices out there that would be available in the US?
There is the Bugari Evo sold by Petosa Accordions. However, the "gut" of it is really a Roland Fr-8X.
Also there is the Concerto by Accordions International. It is both a digital and acoustic accordion. This one is "pricey", I believe around $20,000.
Also there is the Concerto by Accordions International. It is both a digital and acoustic accordion. This one is "pricey", I believe around $20,000.
Roland's V-accordion work has two cornerpoints: the sensor technology and the sound synthesis. The button/keyboard sensors are velocity sensitive, not position sensitive. They come from a percussive (piano, not reed organ) background, not a wind instrument background. That offers benefits for using MIDI patches relying on velocity. For better or worse, that is what the sound synthesis works with. With regard to "realism", the FR-8x (I think) provided air use that depends on registration. But air use depends on what you play. And the main air guzzler is the bass, so the Bugari Evo also falls short of providing dependable practice feeling.
The driving force behind the V-accordions was Roland's former CEO, now no longer alive. I don't see that the company has further impetus of closing in on the acoustic realism. But that means that its current point of development is what it is competing on. And that sits in a somewhat inconvenient place. Due to its built-in speakers, it is not relevantly lighter than MIDIfies acoustic accordions. Its optics make it somewhat unpopular for the audience with non-accordion sounds (at least for the lead voices) since they don't know where to look. Its modeling does not give button depression depth a role, so you have to balance it with registration. Its bellows modeling lends, in my book, too much focus on volume variation rather than sound quality variation (different reed travel through the reed block changes the sound waveforms significantly more than just with the volume) which forces the player in a band context to not vary too much. What I am getting up is that the advantage over established MIDI solutions is not compelling. With regard to the fun factor, I can play my Roland into a 20 year old Solton arranger, essentially forget about the bellows and use a foot pedal instead, and the results are good. My stone-age Roland FR-1 at least is light. But a modern FR-8x has heavy speakers built-in.
Why didn't Roland make a wearable active subwoofer/battery belt, leaving just light treble speakers in the accordion? For low-volume practice without headphones, I can forego the subwoofer and use batteries with smaller capacity. There is no need to carry the heavy parts on the shoulder belts.
As it is, Roland is not competing all that well with light pure MIDI accordions without significant heavy internals nor (on weight and realism) with MIDIfied acoustics. There is significant leeway for re-leveraging the next generation of V-accordions, but it does not appear like there will be one.
Ventura
Been here for ages!
generally remembering..
the speakers are neodymium and quite lightweight,
i ordered a spare once to get a better look at it
i believe there would be more weight added because of the
speakerbaffle chambers inside the bellows, fairly thick plastic..
the weight of the amp circuitboard is minimal..
the comparison between the original FR7 and FR5, both of which
i had, seemed negligible to me
the speakers are neodymium and quite lightweight,
i ordered a spare once to get a better look at it
i believe there would be more weight added because of the
speakerbaffle chambers inside the bellows, fairly thick plastic..
the weight of the amp circuitboard is minimal..
the comparison between the original FR7 and FR5, both of which
i had, seemed negligible to me
You set the FR-8X to any type of bellow curve you like, with two settings -- "Bellows Resistance" and the "Bellows Curve". I can set it to make the bellows take air in and out on the push and the pull so that it simulates an acoustic accordion. I have to move the bellows in and out. I don't like that because it takes more effort. Why should I do that -- just to "look good" to the audience? With my curve settings, I get a wide range of volume expression/control with a minimum amount of bellows movement. With the bellows curve I have, it is much like the passive nonlinear equalizer of the expression pedal on my Hammond B3. Yes, the bellows operation is quite different than an acoustic. It is like getting used to how a "new car drives". I am equally comfortable with the bellows control of my 8X or the bellows on my Excelsior 960. I can easily switch between the two even though they are very different.
The problem for me is that my acoustic accordion changes the sound quality on pressure more than the sound volume. MIDI calls the effect of the bellows pressure "expression" but the equations the standard offers for that are just talking about volume and dB. An accordion does not have that much dynamic within one register, it has more, well, expression. And I miss that. What you say to me seems like sort of being able to easily switch between the pedals of a car and a helicopter. Both have to do with foot dexterity and reflexes, but the purpose is not really the same. And even the dynamic response curves are different between registers including the difference between left and right. On an acoustic accordion, I can balance reeds with large air use and with less air use by keeping to certain pressure levels.
For me, bellows pressure does too little on a Roland and too much.
The ability to vary the air usage settings on a Roland to me feels like smokescreen that allows me to buy some convenience as compensation for not getting the kind of musically useful behavior anyway that I appreciate.
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Ventura
Been here for ages!
i feel midi controller 11 had plenty of time to evolve before
accordion bellows were added to the equation
the affect it has depends upon how the sound design engineers
implemented the "hooks" it could call upon, and the type of
synth engine variables available
you can hook 11 to the filter sweep or resonance of an ADSR envelope
to affect timbre and tonal balance
if you have preset sample based waveforms you can hook it to
sweep between 4 different sample sets created at 4 different
levels of intensity of the original acoustic instrument
if you have few of these entry points, you can hook it to a
sophisticated EQ algorithm
controller 11 allows for versatility and an alternative to Volume
even in the evolving of Digital Accordions, this was obvious between models
that did controller 7 bellows (the Orla system) vs controller 11
it is still a moving target in a way, as each design can take advantage
of controller 11 in it's own architecture of sound creation
accordion bellows were added to the equation
the affect it has depends upon how the sound design engineers
implemented the "hooks" it could call upon, and the type of
synth engine variables available
you can hook 11 to the filter sweep or resonance of an ADSR envelope
to affect timbre and tonal balance
if you have preset sample based waveforms you can hook it to
sweep between 4 different sample sets created at 4 different
levels of intensity of the original acoustic instrument
if you have few of these entry points, you can hook it to a
sophisticated EQ algorithm
controller 11 allows for versatility and an alternative to Volume
even in the evolving of Digital Accordions, this was obvious between models
that did controller 7 bellows (the Orla system) vs controller 11
it is still a moving target in a way, as each design can take advantage
of controller 11 in it's own architecture of sound creation
I am not interested in how bellows pressure is mapped to MIDI. I am interested in how it is mapped to sound, and I find the Roland sound synthesis to not respond to it in the manner I would find a satisfactory rendition of what I can achieve with the bellows on an acoustic accordion. As I said: for me, it ends up doing too little and too much.
I don't know what model Roland you are referring to. On the 8X, the bellows resistance is variable between -64 -> +64 within each bellows curve. There are 8 different bellows curves that are selectable. This is a lot of combinations. It took me a very long time to get the bellows dynamic response that was perfect for me. You can really tune it for "too little" or "too much"
Like most things I have found on the 8X, you really have to "dig in" to find the software "hooks" the designers left in for the end user. I am still learning. Many are not in the manual. A nice feature for me, is the 4 band equalizer Low Freq, Mid Freq1, Mid Freq2, and Hi Freq., the frequencies adjustable from 200 Hz to 8000Hz, each with a level adjust of -15dB -> +15dB. Then a final Level adjust across all frequencies from 0 -> +127. This is for each Right Hand Accordion register, Orch1, Orch2 and for Left Hand Bass & Chord, Orch Bass and Orch Chord.
micahcowan
Active member
Yeah, I think this is well put. I've an (inferior) FR-1xb, but I've also had opportunity to play the Bugari Evo (which is an 8x internally), and the way that expressiveness is mapped to sound, just seems so incredibly "fake" to me. There's such an abrupt drop in sound in response to minute drops in pressure, and if I adjust the "bellows curve" to remedy that (at least on my FR-1xb), then it immediately sacrifices expressiveness. (Perhaps there are better options for adjusting that in the superior 8xb or an Evo... but I doubt it, given what I've consistently heard from performers). Meanwhile, as @dak says, the way it expresses "expressiveness" itself feels completely artificial: it sounds like you've turned down a volume knob (or pedal), as @John M also said. There's no change in the sound's quality or timbre, which makes the expression seem much more hollow. It's long been my general impression of Roland synthesizers/keyboards as a whole, that they have a long history of being particularly bad at emulating acoustic instruments. It's genuinely weird to me that they went to the (admittedly, lesser) trouble of carefully emulating button/key squeak, and bass reed growl, while abandoning the (to me) much more critical need to accurately sample/model the sound of a reed across the varying levels of air pressure/flow that might be applied.
I've been hoping the upcoming Proxima Mia would be an improvement in the technology, but at least in this regard, the performance samples from their marketing videos on YouTube don't exactly fill me with confidence.
I agree with @Ventura that I don't see any reason why the MIDI side of things would be a problem, and this leaves open the possibility that someone could write a far-superior set of accordion sound models, driven by MIDI input from a V accordion (or other MIDI-capable accordion, but ideally with button sensitivity). But AFAICK no one has, and there's little motivation in the industry to do so. And for independent software devs like me, the task of painstakingly sampling (or worse, modeling) individual reed response at numerous pressures and pressure-change velocities, is quite daunting.
There is no way to get the bellows pressure to affect the tone more and the volume less.
Ventura
Been here for ages!
except
as we advised people from the start, especially those with sore arms,
turn the volume knob up a bit beyond what you "feel" is right
as this allows you to squeeze easier and focus more on nuance and
less on feeling driven to pump harder to get an excceptable volume/sound,
which equals better expression overall
i feel the hooks are sufficiently in there, i like the expressiveness i get
out of them, some may get a feel for them better than others do perhaps
maybe work with the Sax sound, it is easier to hear the timbre ramping up
when you start to kick ass on that
yes they could have made better choices with some of the sounds.. mapping
to bellows rather than velocity or mapping to both or letting individual
artists decide things like this for themselves
as we advised people from the start, especially those with sore arms,
turn the volume knob up a bit beyond what you "feel" is right
as this allows you to squeeze easier and focus more on nuance and
less on feeling driven to pump harder to get an excceptable volume/sound,
which equals better expression overall
i feel the hooks are sufficiently in there, i like the expressiveness i get
out of them, some may get a feel for them better than others do perhaps
maybe work with the Sax sound, it is easier to hear the timbre ramping up
when you start to kick ass on that
yes they could have made better choices with some of the sounds.. mapping
to bellows rather than velocity or mapping to both or letting individual
artists decide things like this for themselves
EuroFolker
Active member
Happy to report that the Made in Italy FR4x does not seem to have any of the quality issues the China made FR1x did.
That’s good news… enjoy and post the results here!
Rodney
Active member
Thanks for your pointer to accordionmemories.com @JerryPH. The first two ‘mild to wild’ videos clarified some things for me and reminded me of things forgotten, like the use of overlays with both the RH and LH. I’m looking forward to seeing the third video and perhaps at some stage some guidance on producing my own UPG using just the 8x and an iPad Pro 2024.
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