First impressions as always are very important. Bearing in mind I played a prototype model a few months ago before the E80 was available means I already had an idea of what to expect on the workshop day, which was to be the first day I had played a full blown version of the E80. As it was when I first saw the product, it looks very impressive. A very clear and large touch screen with very stark and clear colours, a large speaker system, very clear and brightly lit buttons and to be fair a rather large size cabinet for a keyboard to house this powerhouse speaker system.
When the E-80 boots it comes to a piano sound. As soon as you play the piano you know what a treat you are in for. It is without a doubt the best piano I have ever played on a keyboard product. Using a new 88 note, multi-layer piano sample from the RG-7, the realism and quality is quite breathtaking. It responds extremely well to touch and allows expressive playing. I could have played the piano alone for hours! But I had to try everything so off I went. Navigating the system is superbly easy with the lit buttons showing which category you have selected and the large touch screen to simply select what I want by touching it on the screen. The sounds as you may expect from Roland are simply superb and by looking around I don't think I could find a bad one. Saxophones and guitars are very realistic with breath noise, fret buzz and other tonal changes all being taken into account. The trumpet sounds such as the V tp shk are stunning with velocity layered trumpet shake effects being brought in as you play louder. Superb for big band music. A big feature was the Guitar mode of course derived from the G70. It allows you to be able to play a chord in the left which shows the guitar tab for the chord, then play notes which will strum it for you or play arpeggios based on the chord. It was superb fun and a top class guitar sound.
Of course the E-80 styles are next to questions had to try them from all the different categories. There are now 50 completely new styles and 299 reformed styles based on the G-70 but edited to suit the E80 new features. The first one tried was a jazz number. The style was called breezy swing. Quite noticeably it was designed for the great jazz standard Let There Be Love. It was superb! Loved it. You can get away with playing other tunes of course but it was so great to be able to play a tune and actually sound like you meant to with the correct backing. The easy to use One Touch Settings were used for my sound selections and they sounded superb. The sounds were appropriate for the style and usable which a lot of products are not. Of course flying through lots of new styles such as Irish - great for lord of the dance, and Go! rock - johnny be good type style, was amazing fun. It really is a case of pick a style, select your first one touch setting and play. Equipped with 4 intros, 4 endings and all with different intros for minor, major, 7th and different chords meant the styles were great to play over and over again. I was simply superb.
Moving on to the more technical stuff -- Roland have retained the superb Cover feature. This feature allows a style or song to be transformed into a new set of instruments on the fly. SO you can select from loads of settings such as acoustic to hip-hop, from Dance to ethnic and more. The same song or style then breeds a new life and is playable over again. Of course this feature with MIDI files is simply stunning and the E-80 is quite possibly the most advanced MIDI playback and editing system to date. Allowing this instant change of sound on the fly - great for live gigs and being able to save your changes is superb. You can also insert marker points on the fly so if you are coming to the end of a MIDI file or song then you can simply press 1 of your 4 marker points you set as it was playing and simply jump back in for another chorus or verse or whatever you set. The E80 even allows you to save these markers with the song as well! Of course the included vocal harmonizer makes nest work of adding vocal harmonizes to your voice and making any singer sound great and in tune with the playing song! In fact the E-80 is so powerful the new system makes easy work of doing such detailed changes - i.e. saving different amounts of reverb for different drum sounds during playback of a song or style or anything you may require. So much so that the E-80 is quite possibly the worlds best MIDI file player!
A new multi FX system takes care of creating rich sounds, backing styles and songs using different FX all at the same time. The Cubase style sequencer screen means easy to use recording with very powerful single note editing and more. Of course combined with the Lyrics/ score display which shows the music of any recorded song in the keyboard means you will never be without music when you need it and combined with the superb PCMCIA storage slot meaning use of compact flash, smartmedia, memory stick and more will make sure you never run out of space for your edits, files or whatever you need to save.
Overall View -- The E-80 is by far the best keyboard Roland have ever produced. They have had a name for keyboards in the past being poor but they have come along way and now take a stake in a demanding market. It is a superb product offering the MIDI playing musician everything they could ever want, offering a home user every instant easy to use function and style they could ever need and allowing the professional sound editor everything they will require as well! I would highly recommend you see the E-80 or simply buy it. It is a great product and anyone afraid of button pressing need now not to worry. The future of Roland keyboards has arrived.