On 2001-11-04, Antonio Olivari gave this Roland Keyboard MIDI a 5...(804)
Purchase: As my first midi related purchase, I was going to buy a keyboard like most people do. Instead I decided to buy a sound module and a midi keyboard (without sounds) for more flexibility. Together they costed me about $800 and I'm pretty happy with the result. The sound module is the relatively new JV-1010, the younger brother of the famous JV-1080. It's been more than a year with me and I can tell you that I haven't listened to all the good sounds yet, and I use it a lot! Let me tell you that it contains 5 preset banks (128 patches each), 1 user bank which one can edit (128 patches) and the JV Session card (another 256 patches!) that add up to more than a thousand patches. All these patches are Roland standard and this unit also has space for another JV Card.
Pros: If you like to write tunes on programs like Cakewalk or Cubase and your soundcard isn't enough anymore, this could be a great solution. The JV-1010 is great for the purpose of having a really good quality thousand instruments at your disposal at a very affordable price.
Cons: The one thing that annoys me is the lack of knobs on the unit itself for editing sounds. It has only 4 knobs which are minimal like volume and category change. So if you absolutely need knobs to control (especially in a real-time situation) then the JV-1010 is not for you.
Quality: The construction is very robust and very small for the sounds it has. Some people that saw it here thought is was a compressor or a rack fx processor. The quality is standard Roland if you know what I mean.
Summary: This unit helped me in finding the sounds I had in my head. It's very affordable and as I said, a computer music writer will find it a great tool for recording music with the loads of great sounds it has.
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