Integra-7 Review Part 3: What You Hear is How it Sounds


Most synths come with two ways to play sounds: One is play the sound by itself; the other is to assign the sound as a 'part' in a collected setup to be used for layering, multimbral output, or keyboard splits. In Roland's world, individual sounds were called 'patches' and multi-part setups were called 'performances.' One of the biggest frustrations among Roland users was that patches sounded very different in a performance than they did in isolation because the number of insert effects available in a performance was limited.


No longer.

By default, the Integra starts in Studio Set mode, which is Roland’s new terminology for  performances. Patch mode is gone. That’s because every sound you assign to one of the 16 parts in a Studio Set has its own independent effects settings. This is a huge breakthrough. For years, we XV users had to suffer through the XV’s labyrinthine effects architecture that forced us to route parts through complicated effects buses to preserve some semblance of their original sounds. No more. Finally,  Roland users get true WYHIHIS (What You Hear is How It Sounds).You can choose a distortion effect for your guitar, a tremolo for your EP and a rotary effect for your B3 organ and none of these overlap the other parts.

Programming a Studio Set is relatively easy. The display provides a default graphic equalizer-style view of all 16 parts. Each ‘part’ rises and falls in response to the MIDI signal going through it, making it easy to detect MIDI input errors. To tweak a part, simply press the (surprise!) ‘Edit’ button. A ‘tabbed’ architecture makes it easy to move from function to function using four directional buttons and a value wheel. All the usual performance options are available—volume, pan, MIDI channel, layering, key splits, velocity ranges, scales, mono/poly, audio routing, etc. You can save your changes to any of the 64 editable Studio Sets (16 preconfigured; 47 empty). Now, a number of pundits have complained that 64 Studio Sets isn’t enough, particularly for performers who use those using different setups for each song. Since I don’t gig out, I can’t really comment on this, but you can store your Studio Sets on an USB flash drive and load them when you need them. 

Before we move to sounds, let's take a few moments to talk about the way effects work with Integra.

7 comments:

  1. I just got an integra 7 and I can't get sounds from parts 2 - 16 of a set to come out of it, even if I switch the part number on the UI. It will always only play the sound loaded on part 1 of the set. What am I doing wrong? Also how do I get it to play multiple instruments parts simultaneously with one key press from a keyboard?

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  2. The reason this is happening is because your keyboard is transmitting on MIDI Channel 1, and with most studio sets each part is set to a different channel, i.e., Part 1 receives on MIDI channel 1, Part 2 on MIDI channel 2, etc. There are two ways you can fix this problem: Either have your keyboard or DAW transmit on a different MIDI channel (so you can hear that "part" on the Integra), or edit each part in your sound set to receive MIDI data on Channel 1. The latter approach is the only way you can easily get two instruments to sound at the same when you're pressing one key on your keyboard and transmitting on only one channel. This approach is often used for layering effects (like mixing pianos and strings together).

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  3. This was very helpful, thank you.

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  4. Thanks helped me literaly just now thanks

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  5. Thanks helped me literaly just now thanks

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