Roland VK-7

Relatively easy to use. Most B-3 practitioners will put a premium on real-time control (vs digital paging). The VK-7 could be better in this regard, but its stil pretty good. There is one set of drawbars for the two manuals and pedals, but you can switch among these by hitting some very accessible buttons. Its a good system. As another commenter noted, the putting the main volume on the far right and in a knob form is pretty lame.

Other commenters have commented extensivly on this, so I'll resist trying to be comprehensive. The keyboard action is beautiful. Solid, even, and a pleasure to play. The action on mine seems to be holding up very well after almost two years of heavy use. There are various amplifiers simulators to choose from, and I've noticed that the "Stack II" setting, with the distortion at zero, produces a warm, rounded tone that really enhances the breathy quality of the instrument. In fact, its too warm for use with my tube-driven Motion Sound speaker -- the tones disintegrates in warmth -- but is ideal in combination with the internal leslie simulator. Another feature worth commenting on is the bank of non-organ sounds. Ridiculous! This is the keyboard for B-3 emulation. Roland seems to have thought that B-3 players will be psyched to combine these other sounds with organ. I've never even been tempted, and I suspect most organists will feel the same way. I agree wholeheartedly with the other commenter who thought this was a waste of technology. Lower the price or give us more knobs. As I write this, the VK-77 is on the way to the market, with vastly expanded non-organ functions and an MSRP just shy of $6K. Why? If the VK-77 was under $4K, I would buy it, and it probably would be but for the useless orchestral/piano section. Hopefully, the 77 has independent vibrato/chorus controls for each manual. The VK-7 lacks this and its one of my few real complaints.

What Roland has accomplished with the VK-7 should not be understated. They have produced a digital keyboard that is as inspiring to play as the real thing. OK, almost as inspiring. But this keyboard's expressive voice is like nothing I've heard in any other digital instrument. I have the Motion Sound Pro-3 tube-driven tweeter as well as the Motion Sound "Low-Pro" bass rotating speaker. Paired with the VK-7, its a sweet sound and there is plenty of opportunity to tweak both the keyboard and the speakers until you dial in the right sound for the space you find yourself playing in. Its ideal for small clubs. And the Motion Sound system is much louder than a stock Leslie, expanding the opportunities to use it without sound reinforcement. In my opinion, there is no substitute for setting up a rotating speaker system in a room and setting the room awash in organ sounds waves. But if you're just getting a miked version of it through a PA, you're better off just going with the VK-7's excellent leslie simulation.

Its been very reliable. Most Roland products are, so no surprises there.

Haven't used Roland's customer support.

It must be tough trying to make a better B-3 simulator, but I can only assume that someday soon somebody will. After so many years of suffering through the choice between cheesy simulation and chronic backpain, we seem to be approaching Hammond nirvana. The VK-7 is such a pleasure to play, it has become the centerpiece of my rig and it keeps me so busy I don't have time or desire to play with fancier (but less expressive) keyboard toys. That's what real instrument should do.

The VK-7 is designed to be about as easy to operate as a Hammond B-3 as performance goes. I spent about 2 hours with mine and then immediately hauled to to a gig where there were no surprises. That is to say except for the surprisingly good sound that this thing makes.

The Organ section is fully polyphonic. You can press down both arms and every note speaks. And, should you decide to do so, the sound will be compressed just as one would expect from a vintage organ. Reverb is built in and it sounds good and clean.
The Leslie simulation is quite good. And there is total control of the rotary simulation including the crossover from tweeter to woofer, slow and fast rates which are totally independant of each other. The COSM technology from Roland also allows for various amplifiers to be utilized. From a rather clean Type I organ amp to a very dirty, yet warm stack. While these amplifier selections may sound very similar when overdrive is set to 0 they have widely varying sounds when driven hard.
The keyboard itself has good action. I feel very solid playing this instrument. The action is not weighted and there is no aftertouch (this would be nice for the orchestral layerings should you use them).
I think Roland has done a very good job of MIDI implementation with the VK-7. When keyboard splits are assigned the VK-7 will talk on different channels so, if like me you play key bass a lot you can talk to a separate synth for the bass line via MIDI channel selection. All in all, there are separate channels for both input and output for the Main, Sub, Pedals and Orchestral assignments. Here's a real plus - all drawbar movements are captured via MIDI. There is no on-board sequencer.

Marvelous sound comes from the VK-7. The VK-7 has the throatiness in the middle range and the piercing wail in the upper octave that I remember from the days when I played a C-3 in high school (in 1973-1975). The vintage quality is superb. Surely a Hammond fanatic will find something that is not quite right with it but to my ears the VK-7 is inspiring. I have been a Keith Emerson fan for over 25 years and I have played a number of ELP tunes over the years on inferior instruments. I have kissed those days goodbye. This is the first keyboard I have ever had that I feel is as expressive as a guitar. Even a held note, with a little C1 chorus and the rotary tweeked just right breathes life. This instrument will rarely rest in a travel case. I have it set up in my office and play it all the time. It's cheaper than a shrink and I think more effective.

I have had it for less than a week but I anticipate no problems.

This is the axe to have if you do not feel like toting around a 475 pound behemoth. I would buy it again with no reservations.
For years I have struggled to play organ leads on various synths. I could crank out notes but they were lifeless (to my ears) and mechanical. The VK-7 almost seems to be organically attached to my feelings. The VK-7 does not just make sounds. It makes a voice.

A bit in the way of introduction: The VK-7 is a dedicated organ emu- lator, not a synth workstation. It is aimed at musicians looking for an extremely realistic tonewheel organ / rotary speaker sound in a portable, reliable, and cost-effective package. For an organ-focused keyboardist like myself, the VK-7 is laid out intuitively, with drawbars and rotary simulation controls to the left of the keyboard. The patch selection method is "old school" Roland: eight banks of eight. Buttons are large and give good tactile feed- back, and all contain LED's to indicate the status of the button. My major complaint about the controls layout is that the master volume and reverb controls are knobs on the far right above the keyboard. These knobs have only silkscreened dots to indicate position, no molded pointers.As the silkscreening on the Roland's control surfaces is low- contrast, it is hard to tell where these knobs are set with stage lights shining in your eyes. Up-down faders placed on the left, such as those on Roland's XP series workstations, would be far friendlier to live performance. If you don't mind slightly marring the cosmetics, a solution is to set little notches into these knobs where the position dots are, using a heated exacto knife, to provide something you can feel in the dark. The manual, while exhaustively thorough (the MIDI information at the back will be particularly useful for those who wish to use the VK-7 in a sequencing or project studio environment), reminds one of viewing an English-dubbed Japanese monster movie. Par for the course with Roland, I understand. As this is mainly a vintage organ emulator, there aren't really enough parameters to require a patch editor, and I found the two-line backlit LCD more than adequate for accessing all the parameters which control nuances of the organ's sound. (Discussed further below.) Users will want to tweak these to improve upon the factory sounds, which represent the full range of timbres associated with vintage organ.

The VK-7 is fully polyphonic in its organ section, and 64-voice polyphonic in its "orchestral" section. (A small bank of non-organ sounds accessed by its own row of buttons and discussed below.) The organ sounds are three-part polytimbral, corresponding to the upper, lower, and pedal manuals of a console Hammond. The orchestral section has its own part, for a total of four. The MIDI implementation and programmability are too deep to go into in much detail, but the very tip of the iceberg is that things like drawbar settings and rotary speeds are xmitable and rec'vable as either SysEx data or continuous controller data, at the user's option! A feature exclusive to the Roland is its two MIDI inputs, one of which may be changed into a Thru at the software level. A hardware switch on the rear panel configures the inputs so that one controls the lower manual part and the other the pedal part, meaning live players can plug in a second keyboard and MIDI pedalboard without worrying about channel assignments. The built-in reverb, though programmable, also has a real-time control knob adjacent to the volume. Like all digital organs,there is no disk drive, so users who want to back up patch settings will have to go by way of MIDI and their computer. Though velocity is not a factor in duplicating vintage organ sounds, the keyboard does accept and transmit it, and one can hear the effects applying to the orchestral patches. Sadly, no aftertouch. The action, while essentially synth-type, is very quick and somewhat weighty. It has a good, solid feel that stands up to the abuse of key-slapping players like me. Some organists may find it a little too weighty if they like to play a lot of glissandos and windmill chops, but the overall response is far better than that of the Suzuki XB-2's toylike keys.

The VK-7 makes use of phyiscal modelling technology to simulate tone wheel organ and rotary speaker characteristics, with excellent results.
TONEWHEEL EMULATION Idiosyncracies considered by Hammond aficionados to be indispensible to "The Sound" include key click, tonewheel leakage (crosstalk), and overdrive, to name a few. The VK-7 offers user control of the amounts of such sonic characteristics, including a realtime knob for one of the more convincing tube overdrive simulations I've heard. Unique to the VK-7 is independent control of click for both key-ons and key-offs. Between this and the also excellently-rendered Hammond percussion, you can dial up some attack transients that'll really cut through the mix when it's your turn to solo. The quality of the drawbar frequencies themselves, even with all the grunge and click dialed out, is remarkable. They're warm, breathy, not at all digital- sounding, and have none of the undesirable artifacts of sample-based drawbar emulations, such as beat modulation when certain drawbar registrations are used. Apparently, Roland has made a careful effort to duplicate the equal-tempered tuning of the genuine article. Roland has also done justice to the Hammond scanner vibrato/chorus, not to be confused with the rotary sound. Purists will no doubt hear differences between this and the real thing, just as they will hear differences between two vintage Hammonds. Again, the vibrato/chorus is far superior to that of any other SIMULATOR currently on the market.
ROTARY (LESLIE) EMULATION Nothing can take the place of a real Leslie, but at least half the point in owning a clone is that a real Leslie presents cost, transportation, maintainence and miking hassles that are the bane of working musicians like myself who travel and gig constantly without the benefit of record-company infrastructure. The VK-7's Leslie sim is simply the best I've yet heard, and I've tried them all. Fast and slow speeds as well as accel and decel times are independently adjustable for treble and bass rotors, as are volume levels. There is a paramater to simulate stereo separation as well. The fast speed is a little bit squirrely in the upper frequencies, but when combined with the C3 chorus, becomes more deep and lush. It pays to run this in stereo whenever you can. I did an A-B test at West L.A. Music recently, where I compared running the VK-7 (in mono, no less) straight into a KC-500 keyboard amp; and running the VK-7 through a Motion Sound Pro-3T rotor sitting atop the KC-500 with the VK-7's onboard rotor simulation bypassed. My own ears felt that the VK-7's simulation was good enough that the Motion Sound certainly did not add US$600 worth of realism to the sound, especially in a mix. In the mix is where the VK-7's rotary sim shines--at many gigs I get keyboard players asking me "Where's the Leslie?" The non-organ "orchestral" bank of sounds requires a brief mention: it's complete rubbish. I have no idea what it's doing there. I use the "Octave String" sound for disco strings from time to time, but the overall quality is an astoundingly far cry from the organ sounds. Roland would have done well to nix this altogether and spend the $$ on more control, such as a selector knob for vibrato type, realtime pot for key click, and separate vibrato & chorus assigments for the upper, lower, and pedal parts.

I have only owned the VK-7 since October 1997, so I doubt enough time has passed for any meaningful evaluation of reliability. I feel fine using it without a backup--it's built even more like a tank than most Roland products. During my first couple of weeks of ownership, it would occasionally require not one but two power cycles for the LCD to show any information and the unit to make any sound, but this has not happened since.

Roland is a huge company, and I've found that the customer support is inconsistent. I've not yet had a repair or upgrade request, but have called with curiosities and technical questions. The response has varied greatly depending on who I've gotten on the phone. Time on hold is generally not too bad, certainly light years better than Alesis, although Roland should have an 800 number instead of the 213 one they now use.

I can quite honestly say that I would use no other vintage organ emulator currently made. As a Kurzweil owner, I'd programmed my K2000 to the hilt and even added a Voce Spin in lust for better Hammond sounds. I did this because no dedicated portable organ I'd looked at for the past two years sounded good enough to justify its price. Upon playing the VK-7, I had to have it. It has an organic, breathy quality that is hard to explain to non-Hammond-lovers, and that makes playing it an enjoyable experience that approaches playing the real thing. No other portable organ I've tried comes this close. It could be improved upon, (as can a Farfisa organ or Casiotone you bought at Circuit City), by adding a real Leslie. For working musicians for whom this is impractical, but nonetheless love the Hammond sound, this is the axe to want. As there is to date no way to get the electro-mehcanical innards of a B-3 to respond to MIDI, it should also be the axe of choice for those who want killer B-3 sound in a sequencing environment. It will be interesting to watch the industry try to top this one.

The Roland VK-7 is quite easy to use, what with the simple layout and nine drawbars. "Rotary Sound" controls (Brake, Fast/Slow) are just to the left of the keyboard. The presets sound good out of the box, though I reprogrammed them to have a faster slow-rotor speed as the defualt slow setting is too slow.
Unusually for Roland, the VK-7 comes with an easy-to-understand manual.
I don't think a patch editor would be of much use as this is basically an organ. The ancilliary "orchestral" voices are pretty much fixed, you can set reverb and chorus send levels and that's about it.

The organ section has 91 digital oscillators in constant oscillation, simulating the 91 tone-wheels in a Hammond B-3, C-3, A-100, or similiar console. As a result, the organ section offers full polyphony. You can connect a lower manual and a pedalboard, have different drawbar settings for each, hold down every note, and they all will sound. The "orchestral" voice section offers 64-note polyphony.
The organ section sports the obligatory Leslie simulator with separate top and bottom "rotors" and several tube-amp simulations based on Roland's COSM physical modeling. There is also an 11-pin socket for a modern newer Leslie such as the 122XB or 302. Older 6-pin Leslies can be connected using either the 1122 adapter for 122-series Leslies, or the 1147 adaptor for 145/147-series Leslies.
The "orchestral" voices have adjustable chorus. Reverb is global.
As this is an organ, there are no waveform-expansion options. Personally, I think they could have left the "orchestral" sounds out of it altogether as they are nothing special.
The keyboard action is among the best synth-actions I have ever played.

As this instrument's forte is Hammond emulations, A-B comparisons with my pristine 1963 Hammond B-3 were in order. Firstly, while the Leslie simulation is OK, nothing touches a real Leslie. In fact, a digital Hammond clone through a real Leslie sounds better than a B-3 through a simulator.
That said, I was very impressed with how well this emulates the B-3. Foldbacks in the top and bottom octaves were where they were supposed to be, and this thing even simulates the crosstalk/hash noise produced by a real B-3's tone-wheel generator and keyswitching matrix. Of course it has key-click, but it lacks the trebly "spit" of real Hammond keyclick. The percussion attack in the lower registers wasn't nearly sharp enough. However, I'm very nitpicky about the Hammond sound and when I used this axe at a gig with my 145 Leslie, I was impressed about how well it holds up in the mix, that is, until the guitar players got too loud and drowned me out.
The vibrato and chorus simulations are usable, but the chorus positions lack the treble boost and snarl of the Hammond scanner vibrato. Also, the C-3 vibrato setting (most popular chorus setting for B-3 players) is a bit swimmy, especially when higher drawbars are pulled out.
The keyboard, while sensing velocity and sending it to the orchestral voices and external modules, lacks aftertouch. There is also no pitch-bend or modulation lever.
I used this with my Christian rock band and I use it regularly at church. This board is usable in any musical genre in which one would find a real Hammond.

I've only had this organ a short while, but as it's a Roland I expect it to be very reliable. I would have no qualms about using it on a gig with no backup.

Never dealt with customer service, so... :-)

Enjoy!