I hadn't listened to my old Roland D-20 for ages bit I thought I'd dust it off and load up some of the songs I'd written some 18 years ago and I was amazed at how good some of the more analogue sounds were.- and I programmed them! I'd spent pretty much 3 years of my life, night and day, playing this thing and getting some fantastic sounds out of it. Ok, the effects were pretty poor and the drum sounds were poor, but you could always do what Kraftwerk did, and make your own, which I did. One neat trick was that you could put any internal sound, made up of up to 4 tones, into the rhythm section. Great for big effects sounds. My XP80, that I upgraded to, can't do that! In part its the nostalgia of this being my first synth, but all in all this was and still is a very powerful and expressive workstation.

All the D synths are cool, but come on.. The D-50 (Fifty not Twenty or Seventy) is king of the hill everytime.. that synth is magic and these later models are mere impersinations of a great master :)

I've done a cover version of a famous contraversial late 1970's double album song quickly just by running through 2 factory drum preset patterns. And using the guitar and bass patches. Clue: They could send me back to mother in it's cardboard box. I better play all day and play all night and keep my music feelings deep inside. Another song I did was a prequel to that song but is found earlier on the album. All in all it was just another brick in the synth.

Used it as a learning tool for composing and sound engineering. Ring modulation can be used with synth tone and PCM tones. Can make unique tones with the tone structures. It is more versitle than the D-50 as far as partial structure. The D-50 chip is faster and fatter I think. Sounds are nice and D-50ish. No chorus. Reverb and Delay are primitive but make their point. Seperate envelopes for Wave Generator, filter and AMp make interesting sounds. Synth waves have Saw, square and PULSE. PWM is possible. Has pattern memory and pattern rythem track. Could also use a seperate track to add manual percussion or drum sounds or whatever. Basic songs structure/ideas and execution could be done on this quickly even after a bad day at work. Work could be stored on floppy disk drive. I only exceeed polyphony and not cpu resource on this so it is great.

I've had my D-20 for 20 years and it is a fascinating and complex synth. Essentially it's a D-50 workstation (multitrack sequencer + dsk drive) that is multi-timbral with more than double the PCM sampled sounds (256 vs 100), double the number of partials (4 vs 2) to construct tones and more LAS structures (13 vs 7). I had to map out the sound structures and buy a separate programming book to effectively program it. The English translation of the user manual must have been over a weekend and it's a struggle to work with. I've had a lot of fun with my D-20 over the years and it's unique synthesis capabilities make it as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. If you like complexity, you'll love the D-20 and will also like the Korg Karma.