Roland D-50 Linear Arithmetic Synthesiser 61 Key Synthesiser

Launched in 1987 the Roland D-50 Linear Arithmetic (LA) Synthesiser was Roland's first fully digital synthesiser.

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Roland had previously released synthesisers that were digitally controlled but the tone generation used analogue techniques.  Synthesisers like the Roland JX-3P and Roland Juno-106 followed this design philosophy.

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However, the Yamaha DX7's fully digital operation and tone generation became a game changer for musicians and it took Roland 4 years to develop and release their response in the form of the Roland D-50.

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The Roland D-50 was the first in a line of D-series synthesisers.  The Roland D-10 and Roland D-110 were released in 1988.  This keyboard and sound module respectively had a reduced implementation of LA synthesis, but came with an additional rhythm generator.  

 

The Roland D-20 keyboard was also released in 1988, and in addition to the features of the Roland D-10 it had a sequencer and disk drive to save data.

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A key feature of the Roland D-50 was that it had on-board digital effects that could be applied to the patches.  Another feature of the D-50 that made it popular with studio based musicians was that Roland issued the synthesiser in the form of the Roland D-550.  The rack mount had the same capabilities as the keyboard version of the instrument but with a slightly trimmed user interface.

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Programming the D-50 was painful.  Like many of the digital synthesisers of the time the programming parameters were buried in a 2 line LCD display menu structure.  If you didn't own the Roland PG-1000 programmer or another programming device / computer programme then creating a patch was a long and often frustrating process!