Roland RD700GX ... how to set up simple piano sound

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Hi, wondering if someone can help me with my keyboard. I only use it for gigs, and I'm just a piano player ... I don't need any organ or synthetic or crazy sounds, just regular ol' piano - jazz specifically is what I'm playing. I am no-tech and don't want to deal with any tech... just want to turn on and play.

When I turn it on there's a bunch of stuff going on ... reverb, chorus, EQ, etc. The manual is useless, it just shows you how to complicate things, not simplify them. Can someone tell me what buttons to press to get the most authentic piano sound available on the instrument? If it matters, I'm playing through a roland 550 amp or a mackie PA system.

Thanks!
 

SeaGtGruff

I meant to play that note!
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Welcome, mcmac1959! I'm unfamiliar with the RD-700GX, but am looking at the manuals now to see whether I can offer any setup suggestions. :)
 

SeaGtGruff

I meant to play that note!
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As I said, I'm not familiar with the RD-700GX, and have never owned or played a Roland, but I see in the Owner's Manual that the RD-700GX has "One Touch" buttons for quickly selecting a Piano or Electric Piano voice. If I understood it correctly, there are three piano voices (A, B, and C) that can be selected using the One Touch button, and you can modify and save your own setups to these A/B/C One Touch Piano voices. So the ideal solution would be to try out each of the available acoustic piano voices (tones 1 through 26, as well as tones 277 through 285) to see which one sounds closest to what you want, then experiment with different settings to see how they affect the tone. Once you come up with a setup you like, you can save it as one of the three One Touch Piano voices.

I know you said you're "no-tech," so if you "don't want to deal with any tech... just want to turn on and play," then the best suggestion is to try out each of the three default One Touch Piano voices to see which one comes closest to what you want, and just use that voice for the time being. Then you can gradually become familiar with the RD-700GX's various options and parameters, and customize the One Touch Piano voices as desired. To keep from being too overwhelmed, you could pick just one specific feature-- e.g., Reverb-- and focus on learning about it. Once you feel comfortable with that feature, you can move on to another feature. There's no reason you need to try to learn all of the features at once.

One other thing that I recommend is to download the PDF versions of the manuals from Roland's web site (if you haven't already done so), because it can be a lot easier to learn about a specific feature when you can use the PDF reader's search function to find wherever a particular word or phrase appears in the document, as opposed to having to hunt through the table of contents or index, or flip through the pages of the printed manual and hope that whatever you're looking for jumps out at you.
 
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Thanks for the reply! I've been doing as you suggest and I'm happy with the base sounds. I'm wondering... when I turn on the default piano the CHORUS light is turned on. Should I keep it on or turn it off? I don't know what it's supposed to do.
 

SeaGtGruff

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In music and audio, "chorus" refers to when multiple sound sources (or people) play (or sing) the same notes together in unison. If two or more sound sources play the exact same frequencies and waveforms as each other-- e.g., two perfect sine waves at precisely 440.0 Hz-- the waves will interfere with each other, either reinforcing each other or canceling each other out, due to how the phases of the two waves relate to each other and how they're "added together." In theory, two waves can even completely cancel each other out and result in silence, but in practice this never(?) happens because of variations in the frequencies and sound waves which are being produced by the multiple sound sources. In any case, when two or more instruments/people play/sing in unison, the resulting sound is "richer" or more "full-bodied" than the sound produced by a single instrument/person.

Electronic keyboards, synthesizers, or VST plug-ins can use a "chorus" effect to make their sounds "fatter" or "richer." Different methods can be used to simulate the chorus effect, often depending on the type of instrument-- i.e., a synthesizer might use two or more detuned oscillators, whereas a "ROMpler" probably uses another method. An electronic keyboard will generally have two kinds of "chorus" parameters-- one is the actual "chorus type" (i.e., the keyboard may offer a variety of chorus types for you to choose from), and the other is the "chorus depth" or "chorus send level" which determines how strongly the chorus effect is applied to each voice (or tone, patch, etc.-- whatever your keyboard's manufacturer calls the various instrument sounds that the keyboard can play). When you layer different sounds together, or split the keyboard between different sounds, you may or may not be able to pick a different chorus type for each voice, depending on the keyboard's capabilities-- i.e., you might be limited to picking just one chorus type which will be applied to all of the voices in the layer or split. But even if you're limited to only one chorus type at a time, you should be able to control how much of the chorus effect is applied to each voice-- e.g., if you're layering an Electric Piano sound and a Violin sound together, you could have the chorus level turned all the way up on the Electric Piano yet turned all the way down on the Violin, or vice versa.

If the default Piano patch that you're using sounds pretty good, you might want to just leave it set as is. But you may also want to check the manual to see how to turn the chorus level up or down, so you can try out different settings. If you want the Grand Piano to sound "crystal clear," you can try turning the chorus level all the way down. On the other hand, an Electric Piano often sounds better ("richer" and more "shimmering") with the chorus level turned up. And once you've seen how changing the chorus level affects the Piano sound, you might also want to try out the various chorus types that your keyboard offers-- although you'll probably want to have the chorus level turned up all the way while you're doing that, to help you to better hear the differences between the various chorus types.
 

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