Synth Site |  Roland | U-20 Synthesizer |
U-20 Synthesizer At a Glance |
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Released: 1989
| Specifications
User rating: 3.7/5 | Read reviews (38) Roland News(754) Streaming Video (123) |
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Randy Wilson writes: |
I really like the U20. Its piano is wonderful, and the other sounds are good, too. It is not set up to be GMIDI- compatible, but I was able to reprogram it to be pretty close. However, it only allows six part multi-timbral plus drums (=7), which is a limitation on many songs. It responds to channel aftertouch and individual-key aftertouch, but I haven't been able to get the aftertouch to work very well. Apparently you have to push down until your fingers turn white to get high aftertouch values out of the keyboard. The drum set is nice if you have the Latin/F.X. PCM sound card, but without it, there is a big gap in the middle of the keyboard where some sounds should be. The user interface on the keyboard is pretty lame (which is unfortunately typical of many Roland keyboards), as is the manual. So overall, it has its weaknesses, but it sounds wonderful, and I really like it overall. By the way, there is a newsgroup called alt.music.synth.roland.u20 dedicated to this synthesizer. There are a few U20-related files at the ftp site: ftp://synapse.cs.byu.edu/pub/randy/midi/U20/ --Randy Wilson randy@axon.cs.byu.edu Comments About the Sounds: Excellent piano. Drum set is incomplete without the "Latin/F.X" PCM card (which is no longer available anywhere). |
Links for the Roland U-20 Synthesizer
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