Roland D-50

The polyphonic, 61-key, Roland D50 was released in 1987 to compete on the Yamaha DX7 market. The D-50 has become a user favorite over the years, and is hailed as being easier to use and producing better sound than the DX7. Some of its features include nice onboard effects, an innovative joystick for data manipulation, and an intuitive layout design. The external Roland PG-1000 Programmer could also be attached to the D-50 for better and more complex control over sound manipulations. The D-50 was also produced as a rack-mount unit called the D-550. Programming was not trivial however, with nearly 450 parameters user-adjustable.

The D-50 was the first synthesizer to combine digital synthesis with sample playback. The engineers at Roland determined the most difficult component to simulate of a realistic instrument is the attack, so the D-50 included almost 100 sampled attacks in ROM. The synthesizer played back an attack and used the synthesizer section to create the sustain of the sound. This dual-use method was required in the 1987 since RAM was so expensive.

It was not before long that every synthesizer on the market used the exact same scheme to create music. In fact, this scheme was the primary method of digital keyboard sound creation well until the early 21st century, when ROM and Flash RAM were finally cheap enough to store entire samples (and mutilsamples ).

The presets of the D-50 were, typical for Roland, extremely good, and nearly every one of them can be heard on commercial albums of the late 80s. Tracks like "Digital Native Dance" and "Living Caliope" can be heard everywhere.

The D-50 entered the market again in 2004, as emulation software for Roland's V-Synth keyboard.