The Roland G-800 Arranger Workstation

Here are my pages about the Roland G-800.
You will find some info, a few hints, some styles and MIDI files that play well with a G-800.

From the Google statistics, I learned that this page is found quite often. So, I decided to have a look at it and to add some information. I intend to add more over time.

History
My first Roland keyboard was the E-70. A nice keyboard for the time (1992), but the limited number of styles was a disadvantage. I had some extra style cards, but they were very expensive...



Although I enjoyed the keyboard quite a lot, at some point, some of the cons got increasing attention. Definitely, the audio noise level was a disadvantage. After some time, I decided to have a look at possible updates...

E-86
The next keyboard was the Roland E-86, with many new features, like the disk drive and the user styles. Of course, many new samples were a very welcome addition, too.
The sound quality was significantly better than the E-70. I started to record songs on my DAT machine with it.

One of the disadvatages of the E-86 were the shared buttons to select tone and user programs (named performance memory on the G-800). It happened regularly that I wanted to select a different tone, but got a different program instead. In most cases, the style changed as well, so one could be playing an uptempo 16 beat and suddenly continue with a slow waltz...

G-800
In 1995, he G-800 came out and it did not take long for me to replace the E-86 with the G-800.
The G-800 is quite an improvement, when compared with the E-86. The range of the keyboard is larger (the E-86 only had 5 octaves) and there are quite a number of extras.
It simply feels better and it reflected ideas (that I shared with Roland before), like the separation of the tone and user (performance) memory selection.
New samples helped to prevent the 'bored with the same sound' effect. The new drum samples were a distinct improvement and repeated triggering of cymbals, for example, sounded a lot more natural.

G-1000
The G-1000 did not convince me. Although there were some improvements, one of the things that I did not like, was the shared tone/memory selection. On the E-86, this led to regular mistakes.
So, I decided to keep the G-800.

Now, in 2016, I still have it. It is mainly used as a master keyboard.

Hints page
On my G-800 hints page some ideas can be found.

Styles
Check the Styles directory. Some nice styles for you as a little gift for visiting my page...

MIDI files
Have a look at the MIDI directory. Some MIDI files that play well on the G-800.

hints