Roland RD-08

Roland's RD‑08 is a stage keyboard with hidden depths that punches well above its price tag.

Roland’s RD keyboard range has been around for decades, offering various permutations of the stage keyboard concept, from simple preset‑based designs to models (like the current flagship RD‑2000) that border on workstation synth complexity.

The RD‑08 under review here sits at the simpler end of things, and is one of the most affordable RDs ever. It’s a counterpart to the existing, slightly dearer and more sophisticated RD‑88, and is clearly pitched at musicians who want easy access to high‑quality, playable sounds, and not too much in‑your‑face complexity. As we’ll see, though, there is considerable depth if you go looking for it.

Relative Dimension

Let’s start with the basics. The keyboard is Roland’s 88‑note hammer‑action PHA‑4, with textured ebony/ivory feel keys and an additional resistance stage in the downstroke that mimics an acoustic piano’s escapement mechanism. There’s velocity sensitivity (of course) but no aftertouch.

The PHA‑4 isn’t Roland’s top‑of‑the‑range action, but it’s a very good one indeed, with a notably lively and responsive feel. Key dip is 10mm and octave span a full‑size 165mm. Mechanically it’s quiet, with nothing but a damped thud on the downstroke and even less on the release. I enjoyed playing it immensely: it seems to work well regardless of musical style, though is obviously not well suited to some organ techniques and really widdly synth solos.

I’ll let the accompanying photo in this review illustrate what the RD‑08’s control panel offers [click to enlarge it]. Suffice to say, there are fewer knobs and buttons even than on the RD‑88, and hugely less so than the RD‑2000. The pitch and mod wheels are small and stubby too, though serviceable. Crucial stuff on the rear panel includes USB A and B sockets for thumb drives and a computer connection, audio inputs for a mic and stereo line on 6.35mm and 3.5mm sockets, and three pedal inputs. One of those is specifically for a damper pedal and works with continuous‑type pedals for partial‑pedalling effects; a squat switch‑type DP‑2 pedal included in the RD‑08 box isn’t sophisticated enough for that but is better than nothing. The other two pedal inputs are configurable to generate MIDI CC numbers, channel aftertouch and pitch bend, and can also step through memories/presets. All sockets are clearly labelled in white on the top panel, but from the rear only with embossed lettering on the case, which will have you reaching for your torch in dimly lit venues.

Overall build quality inspires confidence and at 13.5Kg it’s easily lugged. It’s worth noting the RD‑08’s tubby girth though, with the very shallow (front to back) control surface behind the keys only accentuating the uncommon height: on my studio desk it was a hefty presence, with the surface of the white keys a full 13cm above the feet, and the total height 15.9cm. That’s something you may need to factor in in some setups: for example, for a workstation with a pull‑out keyboard tray, or some multi‑keyboard stage stacks. The presence of built‑in speakers (downward facing, with top‑panel vents) helps explain the bulk, but at a rated 6W and with a rather boxy quality they’re a handy convenience feature more than anything. For serious work you’ll want headphones, monitors or PA as usual. Helpfully, the speakers can be disabled via a dedicated button.

The RD‑08’s rear panel houses a USB port for computer connection and another dedicated to updates(!), a full‑size MIDI out port, three expression pedal ports, quarter‑inch and 3.5mm audio inputs, stereo quarter‑inch audio outputs and a quarter‑inch headphone port.

Zones & Tones

I mentioned the RD‑08’s simplified user interface: just five sound category buttons provide access to factory preset ‘scenes’, and they are Piano, E‑Piano, Organ and Synth, plus ‘Other’ for everything else. After pressing one you can explore other scenes in the same category by using the Dec/Inc buttons, but the choice is fairly limited. From the factory there are 11 piano scenes (and that includes piano/pad layers), 13 e‑pianos (similar), 10 organs (mostly good‑sounding Hammonds), a mere eight synths, and 20 strings, synth strings, clavinets and vibes, a few brass and synth brass sounds, and two basses. A complementary Favourites system allows quicker single‑button access to sounds if you want to avoid the select‑and‑scroll caper. Preset switching is apparently seamless: selecting a new one won’t kill the lingering sounds of an old.

It doesn’t take long, surfing through presets, to discover the RD‑08 is capable of playing three sounds at once, in layers (or ‘zones’ in Roland‑speak)...

It doesn’t take long, surfing through presets, to discover the RD‑08 is capable of playing three sounds at once, in layers (or ‘zones’ in Roland‑speak) called Lower, Upper 2 and Upper 1. As the names suggest it’s possible to have a layer (a piano and a pad, for example) and a split (a bass sound in the lower octaves) active at once. There are dedicated knobs for zone volume, as well as for an incoming mic/line signal, and buttons and procedures for enabling layers and splits are simple and intuitive.

As for further editing and tweaking, you can quite easily go into a scene and explore some alternative sounds (aka ’tones’) for each layer. At first it seems only very few are available, but as we’ll discover in a minute that’s far from the truth. Secondary functions on the four editing knobs also then allow adjustment of allocated system‑level effect levels and ‘tone colour’, which controls stereo width or a simple macro‑style EQ, but sadly never anything like filter cutoff. Tweaked scenes are easily saved — all the factory scenes can be overwritten, and hence the category names can end up completely arbitrary — and there are a fair few empty ‘INIT SCENE’ slots available too.

Used like this, it’s easy and quick to get down to business with the RD‑08, and for the most part its sounds are of excellent quality. The main Concert Grand acoustic piano sound is super classy, modern, well‑behaved, and with bags of presence and energy. The same is true of the Rhodes e‑pianos, which are complex and soulful, positively inviting lengthy musical explorations. I imagine some RD‑08s will spend their entire working lives producing only these sounds, and why not? They give little or nothing away to much more expensive competition, and even to cutting‑edge sample libraries.

Going further, Hammond organs sound like the real deal but are of fixed registration with no drawbar control. Leslie speaker rotation speed can be (and often is) mapped to the modulation wheel. Synth timbres are full and frequently fruity, and will fulfil some standard gigging duties, but they are not tweakable in real time in any practical way. Also be aware that there are no guitars, harps, non‑Western instruments, percussion or drums at all in the factory scene provision.

Hidden Depths

As I mentioned earlier though, the RD‑08 has hidden depths: there is actually a lot more here than initially meets the eye. First, it turns out that the true timbral range is barely even hinted at by those couple of dozen factory scenes. Dig only a bit further and you can find literally thousands of ready‑rolled tones, in 11 banks, available to load into zones: the downloadable PDF listing them is 37 pages long! Amongst the available sounds, which are organised by category type or in arbitrarily named banks, are hundreds more good‑sounding synths (some specifically referencing Jupiter, Juno, TB and SH‑series Roland classics), many more organs (of tonewheel, transistor and wind‑blown varieties), those missing‑in‑action guitars, world and ethnic instruments, and sound effects. There are scores of pianos too, though nothing else is as good as the flagship tone, and there aren’t any true, high‑quality ‘character’ options like uprights or felt variants. Tones are essentially mini‑presets, and some (intriguingly) load with their own effects, independent of the normal user‑facing effects. You can disable these if necessary via a menu item. Dig really deep there and you’ll even find filter cutoff and resonance controls, and parameters relating to a single envelope and LFO: they can never be liberated to the front panel though.

It then transpires that the RD‑08’s ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ zone names don’t have any particular meaning. You can use them all how you want, as all layers, as a three‑way split, with overlaps, and in any order (with the lower above an upper, for example). There’s no Nord‑like crossfades for zone overlaps, but you can set up velocity switching, control pan position, and decide if a zone receives sustain and other pedal inputs, amongst other things. Again, it all has to be painstakingly set up in menus, but this untrammelled design adds to the flexibility enormously if you sometimes need more ambitious registrations.

In signal architecture terms the RD‑08 is open‑ended too. Each zone gets an effects unit of its own which can draw on close to 100 different algorithms, including respectable reverbs, delays, filters, distortions, amp sims and use‑specific combos (like an amp simulator and tremolo chain for an electric piano). There are also independent three‑band EQs and the ‘tone colour’ processors. All zones can further share a sympathetic resonance processor (meant for piano pedal resonance only, and not extending to true harmonic excitation of held notes) and a send/return type reverb and chorus, before being mixed together through a compressor/EQ stage. A fourth internal sound source is a metronome that has accessible front‑panel controls. Meanwhile the external mic input gets a dedicated, menu‑accessed reverb and EQ.

Taken all together the RD‑08 has the potential to sound much less cut and dried than it does fresh out of the box, with scope for distorted sounds, rhythmically‑sliced lo‑fi textures, lengthy reverbs and more. Sadly, though, this sort of creative use is not encouraged by the user interface: the RD‑08 lacks the real‑time controls of a Nord Stage or of Yamaha’s CP, YC or even CK series, and the menu system, though clear enough, is slow and old‑fashioned. Also, while the huge provision of alternative tones is welcome, there is a needle‑in‑haystack quality to finding something really specific. Getting to the good stuff, through what can seem like acres of filler, will take some dedication and, in the absence of an encoder knob, many hundreds of presses of the Dec/Inc buttons.

Robust Defence

Around the time of the RD‑08’s release I spotted a YouTube video with a click‑bait title along the lines of ‘The RD‑08: is this the best stage piano ever?’ I can save you precious mortal moments by answering that question quickly here: no, it’s definitely not. But that’s not to say it’s a bad one...

Compromises have certainly been made in some aspects of the user interface and feature set, but not, crucially, in the keyboard action and core sounds, which easily bear comparison with competitors costing even three or four times as much.

What we have here is a keyboard designed for affordability first and foremost. Compromises have certainly been made in some aspects of the user interface and feature set, but not, crucially, in the keyboard action and core sounds, which easily bear comparison with competitors costing even three or four times as much. The PHA‑4 keybed is very fine indeed, and feels better (to my fingers) than anything Fatar‑based offered by Nord, for example. And while the main RD‑08 pianos sound superb, by any standards, there’s still a whopping provision of other sounds, if you’re prepared to explore it.

So no, the RD‑08 isn’t the ‘best’, but vital aspects of it are of really excellent quality, offering a premium experience in a budget package. That’s quite rare, and I applaud Roland for concocting this combo. It might not be exotic and aspirational, but I expect the RD‑08 will make a lot of musicians very happy indeed.

Information

£864 including VAT.

www.roland.com

$999.99

www.roland.com

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