Putting Sound Ideas Into Practice

Since its founding a quarter of a century ago, Roland Corp. of Osaka, Japan, has created electronic instruments ranging from its standard keyboard synthesizers to electric guitars that can masquerade as mandolins or banjos.

At Roland’s U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles, employees experiment with the latest instrument technologies in an auditorium-style room called the Learning Center. The walls are draped in acoustical foam to contain the sound from the keyboard, electric guitar, electronic drum set, digital piano and GrooveBox (a contraption designed for disc jockeys) arrayed onstage.

Roland’s U.S. president, Dennis Houlihan, recently invited The Cutting Edge to a demonstration of these machines, which can mimic the sounds of traditional instruments or be made to create fantasy sounds from scratch. Afterward, Houlihan--who put himself through college as a professional organist and manned the keyboard for two baseball seasons at Chicago’s Wrigley Field--talked about traditional and electronic music.

Q: What would you say is the definition of an instrument?

A: To be an instrument it has to create a good sound; it has to be easy to operate, and it has to be satisfying to your soul. And to a retailer, it has to be profitable.

Q: Is it cheating to make music with the benefit of all this technology, compared with what people had to work with 100 years ago?

A: It still takes a human being with fingers down on the keys or holding drumsticks or strumming a guitar. It just gives you more power, like power steering instead of manual steering in a car. That’s not cheating. That’s man, 1; technology, 0.

Q: What kind of technology are you developing here?

A: We do a lot of sound development here. We can play the sound of a piano or strings or vibes or a saxophone, and if you had your eyes closed and you didn’t know you were looking at a keyboard player, your ears would tell you that you are in front of a sax player or a piano player or somebody playing the vibes. Getting to that level of authenticity isn’t easy.

Q: What are the hurdles? I’ve heard that if music sounds too perfect, people won’t believe it.

A: That’s true. If electronic music is too perfect, it’s not a satisfying sound to your ear and to the human psyche. There are some harmonic imperfections, and the ability to identify those and then electronically re-create them is Roland’s skill.

Q: How do you do that?

A: It takes a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of really hard-working, talented people who know a good sound from a bad sound and can get into nuance and very, very, very intense detail. You can get a flute sound, but if the breath sound isn’t there, it’s not going to sound like a flute player. If you spend a lot of time focusing on that breath sound and combine it with the flute sound, then your ear starts to believe it.

Q: Are you continuing to improve these sounds?

A: Yes. Music is changing worldwide constantly. Look at all the different trends that have taken place in music, from the big-band era to rock ‘n’ roll to heavy metal to folk music to techno. Music is almost like fashion--where hem lines and lapel widths change, so does music.

Q: But what a piano sounded like 25 years ago or one year ago is how a piano is going to sound next year.

A: Correct. But there are different ways to deliver that sound. The whole industry is under this huge revolution. Going from analog to digital was a giant leap, but within digital itself, there are all new kinds of audio compression, of having very high-quality sounds at lower and lower price points and making it affordable to more people.

Q: Where do some of these sounds come from?

A: From the vivid imagination of very clever people who have the ability to hear something in their head and can then use Roland technology to fabricate it.

Q: How do you decide what sounds to use? Do you vote on them?

A: Yes. It’s very democratic. We get a group of product specialists together and someone will play their sound. It’s a thumbs-up/thumbs-down routine. In musicians’ language, it’s either in the groove or it isn’t.

Q: If it’s not, can it be fixed, to put it in the groove?

A: Sometimes it’s totally out of the ballpark, but in many cases it can be modified or filtered or compressed. Maybe one sound created by one developer will trigger the second half of the equation in the mind of somebody else.

Q: You mentioned that a lot of the engineers here are musicians as well. What do engineering and music-making have in common?

A: In the most simplistic terms, music is mathematics. Music relates to counting, to time, and then it gets into an inner creativity. One of the things about engineering in a music company is that you get to hear the results of what you’ve engineered and hear how your circuit board or device is working. I’m sure it’s passionate for people who make circuit boards that go inside other products, but they’re not going to get the thrill of hearing people make music.

Even for those of us who are not engineers, it’s still a thrill to be involved with a product and see it onstage, to turn on “The Tonight Show” or MTV or VH-1 and see “Roland” on the back of a keyboard.

Q: You still get a kick out of that?

A: Every time.

Q: How does the company stay hip and know what sounds people want to hear?

A: Roland has its ear to the ground in the United States, in South America, in Europe and in Japan. We have the best people as close to the user as possible. They’re in the store listening to what the customers want. They’re in the studios with musicians like Clint Black, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Metallica.

Q: Do you ever get people who look down on a Roland product because it’s not a real piano?

A: Sure, there are purists. There are fans of acoustical instruments and they’re here to stay. There’s also room for great electronic musical instruments. With electronic instruments, you can open up a door to playing all kinds of different instruments and effects, and that just opens up the door to creativity.

I’m certainly not trying to replace an acoustic instrument. But today the ability to use MIDI [musical instrument digital interface] to connect one product to another, to store a performance on a floppy disk, to hook up the keyboard with the right software package to the PC, to display the notation of what you’ve played and to have the score print out is amazing.

Q: What do you see as the big electronic music products of the future?

A: I see hard disk recording as a whole new category. I see sampling technology getting more and better sounds that have lower price points and are easier to operate. I see more modeling technology. What you see here today are the first generation of those products. We haven’t even begun to scrape the surface on things like the human voice.

Q: How would you make the human voice into an instrument?

A: Stick around and see.