Roland E-09

Very easy to use, well, I just use the right hand side of the control panel (ie selecting modifying and saving patches- the auto-accompaniment is somewhat naff for a gigging band musician.) Read a couple of lines of the manual on modifying and saving presets and then it's childsplay. All you can do really is add FX to the patches, but saving, say a Harpsichord and Hammond split for use live is very useful, as is using a very phat bass with a cool Rhodes on top.
Presets variable - organs, pianos (electric and normal) and drums brilliant, and the blow saxes fantastic, but as usual 70% of the preset patches are naff. You can do something with the FX which are good.

Huge polyphony, keyboard action very good, actually better than my Hammond X5 organ, but not weighted, which gets in the way of smears and percussion. Feels like a more expensive synth. I like it.

FX good range - single adjustable FX and lots of non-adjustable combinations, one or two I wanted were missing (rotary/overdrive, for instance for Hammond sounds).

No expansion really. Midi in and out.

Never used sequencer, I'm a musician not a programmer. I use this to give me good pianos and organs live, together with some phat basses and a couple of leads (but there aren't many really good usable ones for my style of music...)

Velocity good, in fact a large range, often I have to turn it off unless I want to slap the keyboard.. No aftertouch.
Pianos and organs very good. Have fooled people with the blow saxes. Lots of the patches sound better in a complicated mix than solo.

For classic rock - using Rhodes, Hammond it kicks ass. For synth basses it's good too but not spectacular. All the guitar patches sound like badly recorded pianos. Strings sound synthetic.

It's Roland. Reliable, except in case of sledgehammer attacks which would floor most things.

Haven't been in touch.

For the ??150 I paid it does the job and I prefer it to Yamaha competition. If I had more money (I also run a Hammond X5 + Leslie, several modules 4 basses and 3 guitars...) I'd get the Juno G - this appears to have the same sound set as the Juno D.

Spent ages trying to find a workhorse that would give me the bread-and-butter pianos and organs I need onstage, and with a few synth basses and a reasonable squelchy lead. Doesn;t have much more I use than that, but for the basics it's tops.

There is not a Software version available for this item. I suspect that there is not upgrade path at all for it.
The presets are quite good. These are taken from (I suspect) from the newest Roland sound engine, and they are very good. The pianos are particularly nice and sound fantastic. The electric piano sounds are also quite good and have lots of depth. The horns are also pretty good; the Blow Sax patch is quite good. I would have added more body to it myself, but considering the price, it is quite good and usable. Since this is an arranger type keyboard, editing is not possible from the front panel or buttons, but you could send Sysex messages to it (if you really think you needed to, but it takes the portability out of it and makes it a workstation VS. what Roland's initial intent was for this unit.
The manual is pretty good and is on par with the types of instruments that it is in competition with.

It features 64-note polyphony, and it works well. I have not run out of notes with it yet and I use every feature on the unit when I play it at church.
It has built in EFX, in the form of a Reverb Processor, Chorus Processor, and an MFX processor. The effects are quite good and help the unit sound good through its built in speakers.
It is not expandable at all, but it is a small price to pay considering the price versus the feature set. When you look at the price of the unit and what you get, it is a no-brainer and quite a bargain.
It is touch sensitive and also features Roland's pitch bender stick thingy. I prefer what Ensoniq used (the wheels), but since I own quite a few Rolands as well, I have gotten used to it.
MIDI is also pretty good and allows for lots of flexibility when sending MIDI signals. I control an E-Mu PK6 from my E-09 and when I set up the right tracks on the preset on the E-Mu, everything works as planned.
It does have an on-board sequencer but it is capable of saving only 1 song at a time. This is quite limited, considering memory prices nowadays, but they had to cut a corner somewhere. My work-around is simple; I use a Yamaha MDF-II MIDI file player to save my songs, create a custom preset (or what Roland refers to as a User Setup on this unit), and let it go. This way, I can have the right rhythms and setups for each song. It is a small price to pay, especially when again, considering the price point/feature set.
Since this unit is Roland's answer to the Yamaha PSR series, it has built in rhythms and the like, and by and large, are quite usable. I am the praise band director at church and quite particular about how things sound, and it really does add a different dimension to the sound that I make every Sunday. We have a guitarist and then vocalists, so I am pretty much everything else. It works very well.

Going back to the sounds, the pianos are quite good. In fact, almost everything that I have used thus far is quite good. Roland really packed a punch with this thing and it sounds great. One thing that I have noticed though is that when comparing the on-board speaker sound to the Line Out sound, it is more muffled when using the line out. It is somewhat puzzling, but again, a workaround can always be found and implemented.
From my experience with the unit (which is about 2 weeks now), it lends itself well to Soul, Funk, and Ballad type settings. This is great, since that is what I focus on, as far as rhythms go. The chord structures can be quite nice and can also be very complex. You can also invert the bass note, so you can walk down a chord pattern the correct way.
There is some 'cheese' in here though and to me, is in the form of the rock backing tracks. The distorted guitar sounds are pretty bad in here, but with 3 modes of backing (bass and drum, combo or full band), you can pare it down to the desired level.
For bass and drums, the funkiness of the board really comes out. Get out the Rhodes sound and spank it till it hurts, cuz it will make you want to really spank it.
The piano sounds are simply great and my particular fav is Piano 2 with either a slight string dual layer or a pad layer. It is brighter than the other pianos and truly a great tone.
Another thing that kind of bothers me about the unit is that you cannot use the Dual feature (where you can layer 2 sounds at the same time) and the Split feature (self-explanatory) at the same time. This would be neat if you could, but again, I guess that Roland had to cut corners somewhere. The work-around is to simply use the bass and drums mode and use the bass sound that comes with the particular pattern you are playing with.
For me, it does seem to react to my playing. I know it sounds weird, but there are times that you do bond with your electronics instruments and this one seems to anticipate where I am going next.

As far as reliability goes, I cannot expect it to break down much, and if it needed to be reset, it is not a problem (it is, after all, Roland's answer to the Yamaha PSR series). I have used it at practice and at home all by itself and it seems very strong. We will see how strong it is, after being carted back and forth to church and whatever other gigs I may have. I would use it without a backup, because of the Dual (layer) feature on it. Simply stack the two sounds I wanna use and I'm good.

To be honest, I have never really dealt with Roland except for one time and they kind of upset me. When I was researching this board, I e-mailed them asking the memory specification on the board (how much RAM, storage capacity, etc.) and was sent a message 3 days later telling me that I needed to contact Tech Support. I thought that e-mails WERE answered by Tech Support. Well, I suppose that if you wanted more tech stuff on an arranger, you should have stepped up to a workstation (I have had an XP-60 for years, not to mention (2) JV-880 synths and (2) D-110 synths. The D-110s are gone though, being sold on EBay since I did not use them much.
I am considering getting another one to keep at church at all times, but at around $500 they are a little bit pricey for that. I may also step up to the GW-7 model, but I think that the soundset on the E-09 is newer, so what are you really getting...

This unit is quite good and I would get another unit if it were stolen or broken. I bought this unit as a 'Scratch and Dent' special from American Musical Supply for $439.00. To me, that was quite a steal and well worth the work-arounds that I must use to make it work better. I have been playing piano for over 30 years, been on the road for many years and own 12 other synths (technically 10, since I sold my (2) D-110 units). To me the soundset is superior to anything that Yamaha or the others have in its price range and even higher priced. I has Roland's tried and true soundset and it works very well. I like the fact that I can turn it on, and start jamming. When I turn on the synths in my studio, I have so many things I must do, and then I do not have backing tracks or even pre-programmed rhythms to jam to. That alone, sparks my creativity on the unit and is a great buy. Go check it out, and you will not be disappointed. It does exactly what it does, and does it very well.
I also own:
Alesis QS6, Ensoniq SQ1+ and SQ2 32-voice, (2) Ensoniq VFX-SD, E-Mu PK6, (2) Roland JV-880, Roland XP-60 and Yamaha TG-33 and this unit has the best piano sound of all of them. When playing in a live band (or my solo show) scenario, I bring 5 boards for my sound. You can bet that I will at least try the E-09 on a couple of gigs, especially on gigs where I am playing bass (got a couple 5-string basses too). Pack it up, throw in the car, go to the gig, and jam.... that is the name of the game.

This isn't as straightforward as your typical home keyboard. Button layout is minimal. Thus, you would need to memorize a good number of button combinations to get to the more intricate functions of this board. More like a synth than a home keyboard. If you're used to standard synth operation, you'll be right at home with the E-09, but if you're accustomed to home keyboards like the Yamaha PSRs, you might find the E-09 a bit cryptic.

I can go so far as to say that the E-09 is really a synth underneath trying hard to be a home keyboard. Not in any negative way, mind you. If you are used to professional synths and wanted to get introduced into intelligent arranger/home keyboard stuff, this may be your ticket.

The presets are very good. And there are LOTS you can choose from--800+ in all if you include the 70+ drumkits (which aren't really distinct from each other since they tend to reuse some samples from kit to kit). I must make special mention of the PIANO patches of the E-09 since that was the reason I bought the board in the first place. In a word, they are AWSOME! You cannot get piano samples that sound as good as those on the E-09 across its price range or even across keyboards twice as expensive.

Out of the box, presets cannot be edited, BUT there is a way to circumvent this limitation. If you can hook the E-09 to an external controller/knob box/software sequencer via MIDI, then you will be able tweak the presets using typical synth editing parameters like Attack, Cutoff, Resonance, Decay, etc. by sending change events on the corresponding control numbers. You can then save your tweaked sounds on any of the 100 user programs on the E-09 for future retrieval.

The E-09 has 64 notes polyphony (which is pretty generous for a keyboard at this price range), 32Megs wave memory (at par with many high-end synths), 8 types of reverbs and 8 types of choruses, and 47 multi-effects (which are actually tweakable effects presets that may combine two or more effects such as delay, distortion, flanger, wah, vibrato, etc.). It also has about 100 auto-accompaniment styles a-la Yamaha PSR.

There's also an on-board 16-track sequencer with basic editing capabilities which is a boon. My only gripe with it is that you can only sequence one song at a time with it. Since the E-09 doesn't have any built-in external storage capabilities (no floppy drive or multi-media card slot), you will need to bulk dump your sequence externally before you can work on another one. IMHO, users would've really appreciated it if Roland had equipped the E-09 with a multi-media card slot even if it bumped the price up by $50 or so. But I guess they don't want their lower-end keyboards encroaching on their more expensive lineup.

Keys are velo sensitive. No aftertouch. You also get the standard Roland joystick-type pitchbend/mod controller.

Key action is EXCELLENT. The E-09 sports the same high quality keys/key-action you find on high-end synths. Very very "un-home keyboard-like". As a mattor of fact, the whole physical construction of the E-09 just screams pro-synth quality--from the great key action, the charcoal-grey body down to the solid buttons. The E-09 has more in common with Roland's pro synths than their pathetically toy-like EM series of home keyboards.

As I've mentioned, the E-09's sound engine is very very good (It seems to share the same sound engine with the Juno-D.) Special mention goes to the Piano samples. The percussion samples are excellent and there are more than 70+ kits to choose from, and the strings/guitars are excellent as well. It also has a good complement of World instruments samples useful for adding native/ethnic touches to your music.

Not so excellent are the sax and brass, and synths instruments. I'm not trying to say they sound bad. They actually sound good, it's just that they didn't impress me as much as the pianos, guitars, strings did.

If you're into standard music, latin, jazz, or new age, then you're gonna go places with the E-09. But if you're into techno, industrial, groove, the E-09's lack of editing and sound expansion capabilities might be a huge limitation.

Have had it for less than a week, but looks as tough as any modern pro synth you can find out there. A cut about all other home arranger keyboards in terms of build quality. I could probably gig with my E-09 without backup and not have to worry about it.

Haven't had it that long yet to need any customer support.

If my E-09 gets lost or stolen, I would probably buy a new one. You just could not find a more professional-sounding board at such a low price. I have had it less than a week and I have already grown fond of its excellent piano samples.

I really don't mind its lack of onboard sound editing capabilities. I am not really the type of user who is compelled to tweak instruments. I can make do with presets. The E-09's 800+ presets is more than enough for me. Besides, as I've mentioned in this review, there is a way to go around the lack of sound editing capabilities of the E-09 in case the need to tweak the presets arises. What I do mind is the sequencer's one-song limitation. I really wish Roland had gone the extra mile and equipped the E-09 with a multi-media card slot for external storage.

But despite its limitations the E-09 is still an excellent keyboard due to the high-quality sound engine and excellent build quality. And for that, I give it a 9/10.