Roland RD700 GX Digital Piano

Today we’re going to talk about the Roland RD700 GX digital piano. One the most notable features that I picked up on when reviewing this keyboard is the impressive onboard pianos and electronic piano sounds. The RD700 GX showcases Roland’s newest sound engines which creates exceptional sound quality.

This is an 88 key graded hammer digital stage piano. The piano sounds are so lifelike because it features Roland’s latest technology which brings out very expressive piano sounds from the keyboard. When I sat down at this keyboard and took it out for a test drive much to my surprise the keyboard felt very comfortable to my fingers due to the “ivory feel” that has been accentuated on this keyboard. The touch on this keyboard is very responsive. The sound samples on this especially the electric pianos are simply the best that I’ve heard is a testament to Roland’s new supernatural technology. Supernatural in this case actually relates to Roland’s new marketing term for its latest technology.

Another feature that I really liked was the USB audio inputs. The USB audio ports make it easy to play audio right through the RD700 GX keyboard. The USB audio port will support wave and MP3 file formats. Access and control of the audio playback and other features can be controlled from the bottom 15 notes of the keyboard.

Another feature is that you can customize the onboard sounds right down to the most minute details such as noise of an acoustic hammer, the vibration of the strings — that is the degree of vibration in the strings can be controledl. Essentially you can control many of the elements that make up the actual sounds on this keyboard.

The Roland RD700 GX digital piano features 256 MB of onboard memory for storing your songs and tracks. it also features 128 voices of polyphony which means lots of room for adding layering tracks and notes that can be recorded and played on the MIDI sequencer.

We’re going to look at the effects section. I noticed that it is split in two 2 x 4 system with over 124 types of effects. Drilling down we see combination of the six main reverb types and three main choruses which can all be channeled through a 3 band compressor and four band digital equalizer.

There is an onboard arpeggiator which comes with 150 different styles and a drum kit with over 200 different types of patterns are included.

The one thing that seemed lacking on the stage piano is the lack of speakers which might not be uncommon for stage pianos, but when you look at the CP 300 Yamaha which is a professional stage keyboard it does come with internal speakers. Its great to have internal speakers rather than having to rely on external speaker sources.

In terms of connections to the RD700 GX, the piano comes with left and right mono inputs, left and right XLR type outputs, damper pedal, FC1 and FC2 pedal, and 1 MIDI in and 2 MIDI out and MIDIt through and a USB MIDI memory.