Roland MC-707

In the half-year that passed, I ended up getting my own MC-707, even though I already owned the MC-101 which has the same Zen-Core sound engine and quite a bit of same sequencing functionality.   The money spent on the 707 could, after all, have gone instead to any of the newer, shinier synths out there.   Buying the 707 has proven to be the right call for me. Comments on various aspects:

Pads - I had to adjust the sensitivity because the pads seemed to require a little more velocity than I would like to trigger sounds. Even after adjustment, the synth still seems more responsive to MIDI velocity from my Arturia Keystep 37 than to velocity on the built-in pads. I find the pads most useful for sequence editing and auditioning drum sounds.

Synth Editing - Most commonly used settings such as Oscillator Type, Filter Cutoff, Amp stages, etc. are easy to find in the Easy Edit screen. However, some settings are less obvious like pages that require pressing the Func button to access. Unfortunately, none of the tutorial videos I could find on Youtube address how to map MIDI aftertouch and MIDI velocity to synth parameters, which to me seem like basic functions that any user who wants to use a keyboard controller would really want to know. After some trial and error, I figured out that SYS-CTRL2 defaults to MIDI aftertouch as a source - then I was able to map aftertouch to filter cutoff. Someday, hopefully in the near future, I will discover exactly where the information on what SYS-CTRL2 and other SYS-CTRL sources represent... is buried in the Reference Manual. What really gave me a devil of a time is figuring out where the MIDI Velocity setting are in the synth engine, because I wanted to add velocity-sensitivity to a particular preset, which had a sound I really liked but it was programmed to be full blast. I spent hours in the Matrix pages searching for them, testing different SYS-CTRL numbers in the belief that one of them would be velocity. I finally found the Velocity assignments, but they were not in the Matrix pages! They were actually in the Amp->Other section of the Partial Edit screens. This is the section where you set Velocity Curve and Velocity Sens for each of the 4 Partials. I made my changes there but the sound was still full-blast, unresponsive to velocity. I then figured out that I had to go to the Amp->Level section, where I saw that all 4 Partials had be maxed out to 127. I lowered these 4 values and, magically, the preset was suddenly velocity-sensitive.

Clip Grid - When I only had the MC-101, I had a lot of difficulty understanding how Clips are organized into Scenes and why others kept insisting that Scene Chaining was needed for a real song mode.  The MC-707's bigger display over the MC-101's stingy 2-line display proved to be the difference maker. In the MC-707, I have a much easier time seeing what Clips are under which Track, and what Clips have been selected when I save them to a Scene. As noted in the original review, in the MC-707's clip grid display, colunms represent Tracks, and rows represent the Clips for each Track and the default order in which they may be played. Also as noted in the original review, you can select any combination of Clips, as long as they're from different Tracks, and save them into a Scene - and the Clips do not have to be on the same row. I found all of this difficult to see on the MC-101's stingy little 2-line display. Thanks to the MC-707's bigger display, I was finally able to see and understand why Scene Chaining is so critical for "song mode", and Clip Chaining, while a nice update, was not adequate. I believe at the time of the original review, there were only 8 Scenes allowed, which would have limited "song mode" on this machine. Thanks to latest round of OS updates, you have multiple banks of Scenes for a total of 128 Scenes.

Preset Sounds - As previously noted, MC-707 comes with a generous selection - 3000+ Tones, 80+ Drum Kits - of sound presets, organized by category. My MC-101 purchase coincided with a Roland promo that gave me 1 year of Roland Cloud and Zenology Pro subscription for free. I never got around to messing with Zenology Pro for sound design as I'm not really a sound design freak, but I did grab about all the MC-101/707 Zen-Core Sound Packs that were available during this subscription period. After the subscription expired, Roland has continued to pump out new Sound Packs at a steady rate, so I bought some for 99 cents each, which is a steal because even if I use only 1 preset per pack in actual music, I still get a lot of educational value from studying the presets in the synth editor. Anyway, if you like Roland rompler tones, you'll probably like the PCM-based tones on this machine. If you prefer certain sample-based tones Yamaha or Korg romplers, then I'm not sure these tones will sway you. The VA tones sound excellent to me, although as noted previously, this too is subjective. Among the offical Sound Packs, my favorites are Ambient Pads, Ancient Discovery, Cinematic Beds, Modular Grooves, and The Drones. One caveat is that you can only save your user-edited sounds as part of the Project. So I will have to figure out a way to share my user sounds between Projects.

Sequencing - So far I have only created simple patterns as part of the learning process, not having gone as deep as the original reviewer. There are some interesting tricks for introducing pattern variation in real-time without using Scatter, such as manipulating First Step and Last Step parameters, and Step Jumps. Recent updates introduced Count-In, which is very welcome! When the metronome is turned on, however, it is freaking loud, and there is no obvious way to turn it down. I'm sure the setting is just one button combo away - Shift plus another button or something like that.

Effects - There is one Effect slot per Track, with a choice of about 90 different effects. The rest of the effects live at the Project level, affecting all Tracks, and referred to as "Total Effects" in the manual. These are Reverb, Chorus/Delay, MultiFX, Compressor, and EQ. You can really only select one effect at a time for MultiFX - I guess the "multi" refers to the choice of multiple effect types not covered under the other 4 Total Effects, such as Multi-Mode Filter and distortion. At the Track level, you have Delay Send and Reverb Send settings.

Various extra comments:

Project Naming - I like how this is implemented. C1 moves the cursor left-right. C2 switches capitalization. C3 moves the character wheel.

I did not find a 4-note polyphony limitation for Tone Tracks. I was able to enter 5-note chords just fine for a Tone Track. I also tried playing a 10-note chord - all 10 notes were played just fine. I have read there are voice-stealing settings, which are needed when polyphony-eating synth settings are used, as noted in the original review.

Easy vs. Partial Edit may be confusing, but having both modes made it possible for me to assign aftertouch to Level in Easy Mode, then switch to Partial Edit for Partial 2, and assign aftertouch to LFO1 Rate, so that aftertouch raises LFO1 Rate only for Partial 2 and also boosts the volume for swells. At first, I had aftertouch modulating LFO1 Rate for all 4 partials. In this preset, LFO1 modulates Amp. Amp being modulated for all 4 partials sounded a bit too intense for me. Having it modulate Amp only for one of the 4 Partials was more to my liking.