Roland D-110

In early 2025 I scored a Roland D-110 for a very reasonable price. So reasonable in fact, that I could justify to myself that purchasing it with only about an hour of reading up on it and its quirks made sense. Arguably that was a bit of a mistake.

The device is charming to me. It is a rackmount MIDI synth and makes all the neat sounds from 80s pop music. It has multiple voices - Roland calls them "channels" - which can all be programmed to different (even multiple!) instruments - which Roland calls "timbres" - MIDI channels and outputs - Roland calls such configurations "patches". It comes with a few pre-configured sounds for those voices as you'd expect, but you can program your own as well. It even has the classic Roland drum samples built-in.

Unfortunately the device is painful to use. Forget programming your own sounds using the menu. It's annoying enough to use even one of the pre-configured ones already. I wonder if this is the reason you can hear its pre-configured sounds in so much pop music from that era: Maybe no one could figure out how to use it. There are external programming units, but it is effectively impossible to obtain one.

You can program it via MIDI. I had some success with EdiSyn^↗. But even so I did not get very far. The D-110 has a pretty weird synth engine and I never quite managed to get any decent custom sounds out of it. You can however find good patches online if you look for them; some people managed to convince the device to make interesting - even pleasant - noises. I myself only use it for the drums and the pre-configured sounds, which are cheesy and therefore charming.