Roland W-30

The Roland W-30 is a sampling workstation keyboard, released in 1989. It features an on-board 12-bit sampler, sample-based synthesizer, 16-track sequencer and 61-note keyboard.

W-30
Roland W-30
ManufacturerRoland Corporation
Dates1989–1994
Price£1599 GBP [1]
Technical specifications
Polyphony16 voice
Timbrality8[2]
LFOYes (sine peak-hold (with offset))
Synthesis typeSamples
FilterTVF
AttenuatorADSR
Aftertouch expressionYes
Velocity expressionYes
Storage memory15k steps, 20 songs disk: 100k steps, 64 songs
EffectsNo
Input/output
Keyboard61 keys
Left-hand controlCombined Pitch bend and modulation switch
External controlMIDI In, out, thru

Overview

The W-30's "Workstation" title stems from its incorporation of synthesis, sampling and MIDI sequencing capabilities. Although primitive by modern standards, the W-30's onboard sequencer was a practical way to arrange music as opposed to a DAW.

Unusually, while sounds are sampled with 12-bit resolution, they are played back through a 16-bit D-A converter [3] which, in theory at least, improves the sound quality. Nonetheless, the slightly "gritty" nature of the samples could be considered one of the instrument's charms.

The W-30 is compatible with the sound library of the Roland S-50, S330 & S550 dedicated samplers, which are now in the public domain.

Expansion

The workstation's back panel features a blanking-plate labelled SCSI. This allowed the very rare "KW30 SCSI kit" upgrade to be fitted. The KW30 gave the W-30 the ability to behave as a SCSI Master device, and drive SCSI hard drives and CD-ROM players through a standard 25-pin SCSI cable. Copying samples to a SCSI hard drive (maximum usable capacity: 80Mb) dramatically reduces load time compared to the built-in 3.5" floppy disk drive.[4]

Notable users
gollark: Technically you can't embed CPython or whatever very well, only MicroPython.
gollark: I quite like it.
gollark: > And I would, because Lua is the worst language ever.Heresy. At least it's not COBOL, or Pascal, or Visual BASIC, or C.
gollark: My very old and bad storage system used to have an autocrafting system, but it was very primitive and could only handle simple cases where there's only one way to make each thing.
gollark: Well, this is interesting, at least the bits I vaguely understand.

References
  1. "Roland W30 (MT Jul 89)". www.muzines.co.uk. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  2. SynthArk, Designed by www.1234.info / Modified. "W-30". www.synthark.org. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  3. http://www.dancetech.com/item.cfm?threadid=4155
  4. http://gamelay.usami.com/~netboy/w30/sites/w30.msoft.it/expansion.html
  5. http://theprodigy.info/equipment/w30.shtml
  6. http://www.dubstar.com%5B%5D
  7. http://www.musicapopular.cl/grupo/la-ley/
  8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDCyIKRBbz4
  9. Diez, Juan Carlos (2013). Martropía (Conversaciones con Spinetta). Buenos Aires: Aguilar. pp. 145–147. ISBN 9789870432449.
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