Review of the Roland Sound Canvas

Hi there,

I've been trying out the Roland Sound Canvas as an alternative
to the Yamaha Soft Synth for FTS users with Windows 2K - and am
rather impressed by it.

The sounds are nice, and the pitch accuracy is good. Here one
runs into a problem that the sounds are probably based on good
acoustic samples and if you look at them in detail you see many
tiny peaks in the spectrum super-imposed on the main peak - common
with acoustic instruments. The problem there is that the main
peak may have a tiny peaklet at the top offset to one side of the
centre - so the highest point may not be quite the perceived pitch
(it is only a tiny bit higher, a very minute peaklet). In fact it
has dozens of those on top and to either side. So which do you
take as the pitch of the partial - or do you try and find the pitch
of the main peak instead (which seems best).

I use a mean value method in FTS to deal with this situation
- find the sum of the products of teh amplitudes with the
frequencies over a region within say ten percent from the
peak to either side - and divide by the sum of all the
amplitudes to get the mean frequency (just like finding the
mean of a population in statistics). Works quite well
- suitable if the peak isn't too asymmetric.

The Roland also has a recorder voice that has very
clear isolated partials, and that was easier to
measure.

General concluson from testing several instruments in this way
is that it seems to be accurate to within less than a cent.

This was my measurement for the recorder (preliminary):
0.0 386.714842 702.75635
for just intonation triad, one minute sample.

Also, the different voices seem to be accurately pitched
to within a cent of middle C - that is nice because
in the SB Live, different instruments, or
even different samples of the same instrument often
vary by two or three cents to either side of concert
pitch. May just be a matter of the amount of care taken
with the pitch of the original samples - I think that is what
it is - and could be fixed with the SB LIve! by retuning the
samples in the sound font.

Hard to say whehter it is more accurate than that
because of the complexity of acoustic sounds,
maybe not. Certainly not as clear cut a situation
as the FM7 which is probably accurate to within the limitations
of single precision floating point arithmetic (got quite close
to that with a one minute recording)
(which is pretty fine compared with normal
human hearing pitch discrimination).

Some other comments:

One thing the Yamaha has which the Roland doesn't is that
it has true monophonic legato where the repeated notes of the trill don't
re-trigger the attack - only get the attack at the start, then
overlapping notes are played true legato. You get that by setting the
portamento slide to 0 in combination with legato monphonic.

The Roland has portamento too - but always with attack at the start of
the slide.

The Yamaha also has a very slight hiss accompaniment
to all the instruments (which you only hear while they are playing,
most noticeable during decay of a quiet plucked sound - stops
just after the sound has finished dying away to silence) - while the
Roland doesn't have this at all as far as I can hear.

The Roland I think also needs a slightly faster computer than the Yamaha.

Nice quality sound. Well, the recorder doesn't sound much like
a recorder to me - but one is always more critical of ones
own instrument. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever
heard a satisfactory midi recorder (haven't tried it with Giga which
might be reasonable I expect), though other instruments often seem
quite passable to me.

The other instruments sound pretty good to me so I think you should
ignore that as the bias of a player who will never be satisfied
with a wave table version of his own instrument.

Certainly as good as many wave table synths anyway.

Also you can save the midi files directly to waveform audio -
though I'm not able to test this as I haven't
bought it yet, and you need to buy it to use this feature.
But at $20 it seems a pretty good buy and I'll almost
certainly get it for myself, and am also recommending
it for FTS users who need a soft synth in order to
hear the tunes.

At present still in the 30 day trial period, but I'm
pretty sure I'll buy it at the end of that time (or maybe
before if I need the midi to audio conversion).

http://www.edirol.com.au/downloads.asp

General conclusion - a nice wave table soft synth
to have on ones out menu!!

:-).

Robert