Vintage Synth Explorer

Roland • XP-50

The XP-50 is not just another synthesizer workstation, it's basically a JV-1080 with a built-in keyboard and a 16-track sequencer! It is a digital synthesizer using sampled ROM waveforms. Superb sound quality capable of emulating most any instrument imaginable plus totally fat analog synth type sounds and loads of percussion! It has 64 voices of polyphony and is 16-part multitimbral. The XP-50 makes a great beginner's pro-quality workstation.

It has 8MB of sounds and it also offers a lot of expandability with 4 expansion slots and 2 data card memory slots. You can get up to 42MB of sounds by adding any of the popular SR-JV80 expansion cards suited for Techno, World Instruments, Orchestral or Synthesizers. There's also plenty of multi-effects, reverbs, choruses and filters for creative flexibility, motion control and extensive MIDI implementation.

Some of the features the XP-50 brings (to the JV-1080) are a standard 61-note keyboard with velocity and aftertouch. The MRC-PRO 16-track sequencer which features 60,000 note capacity and can hold 100 patterns and 1 song. Several recording features (loop, step, realtime), quantization and editing features are available too. A built-in 3.5 inch disk drive facilitates storage of your sequences and MIDI data. With a 'bang for your buck' value the XP-50 still makes a great keyboard alternative to the JV-1080. That means you get some of Roland's best sounds in a performance workstation that is as affordable as 'pro-quality' can get (beyond which come the XP-60 and XP-80 mega-synths). It has been used by The Cure.

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manos

Posted 8 days ago

i also have the full manual, and quickstart manual and a pile discs for the drive too that have never been used.

manos

Posted 8 days ago

i owned my xp-50 from oct. of 98 until this summer (2009) when the power failed on me. i took the liberty of completely disassembling it. im not sure what on it still works but i got the disc drive in tacty, most of the boards inside, the shell, and a couple baggies of plastic buttons, magnets (from under the plastic buttons) the volume/control slider knob things, the pitchbend/mod wheel thing, the internal battery and the keyboard itself and the green board under it... if anyone wants that [beep] leave a message here. well except the keys themselves, i want em for sentimental purposes... i recorded over 20 hours/300 songs worth of tracks on that thing over the past 11 years (that were released, probably like 40 or 50 hours/4-500 tracks i kept to myself) so ill check back here if anyone is looking round.. i dont want much for it, maybe even free

Bill Parsons

Posted 21 days ago

I need to replace the disc drive. Where can I find a replacement?

samson

Posted 47 days ago

ftp://ftp.roland.co.uk/productsupport/Ma nuals/ there's the manual, even tough it doesn't really explain pretty much...I got myself an XP-50 secondhand and the user interface isn't quite user friendly. But I have to admit that this synth sounds quite great albeit some of the sounds are bit dated.

jake

Posted 56 days ago

does anyone know where I could download a manual for the xp-50? I got it 2nd-hand and have no idea what many of the buttons do... any ideas?

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