Bob and RHarv:

I'm glad to hear your observation on the Roland RD700GX manual (mine has the suffix e2 if that means anything) which concurs with mine. I think it all gets down to vocabulary. Roland is a small company (about 300 permanent employees, 2500 total, worldwide ... they have a philosophy of outsourcing their engineering, manuals, etc.). So one Japanese engineer is probably responsible for writing the manual (in his spare time, I bet) which is then translated by a consultant in Australia who just graduated from (say) U of Melbourne language and literature programs, and who is wondering just what this guy means when he says "パフォーマンスモード" (oh, and he doesn't speak a word of English, so no help asking). BTW, I think PG Music may operate similarly (maybe it's just Peter and his brother and a sales staff) but at least they are Canadian. Ay?

Anyway, for me the big issue (and again, I don't have a background in this) is matching up the various vocabularies in BiB, Roland manuals, MIDI terminology, and my own (perhaps misguided) preconceptions about what exactly is going on. I think a schematic diagram in the BiB manual (or RB) would be a big plus, showing how all of the parts fit together -- especially since I don't really understand how BiB is using all of its components. Plus there are a lot of just notational and conception aspects of music in which I am deficient. For example, I can sort of get what Pushes, etc. are from watching the videos and reading the text, but the concepts are novel to me.

Anyway, I've got the basic structure sorted well enough to be able to use either RB or BiB as a sequencer for my Roland. I'll next be working through the set up (to use the RealTracks / RealDrums synthesis and see how this works on my computer)

Chris

Last edited by westland; 10/14/10 12:48 PM.