Roland U-110 PCM Sound Module

The Roland U-110 PCM Sound Module is a 1U sound module released in 1988 as a pure sample-based synthesiser.  This type of synthesiser was also known at the time as a playback synthesiser based on how the synthesise was generated.

The PCM in the title stood for Pulse Code Modulation and was a mechanism by which the initial tone generation was from a small sample.   You could therefore argue that this was a sampler, but the Roland U-110 had no sampling capability and therefore does not meet the criteria as a sampler.

The PCM sample was shaped by filters and effects that were added to the instrument to derive the final sound.  The Roland U-110 allowed limited tone manipulation allowing the musician to add just chorus and tremolo to the final sound.

Roland launched the Roland U-110 with 98 present sample-based tones split into the instrument groups e.g. piano, organ, guitar etc plus a 99th Drum set.  These were preset in the instrument and the musician was not able to tweak them.  What you heard was what you got.  As I said above the synthesiser had limited onboard effects and therefore to manipulate the sound you really needed an external effects unit to send the outputs to.

In addition to the onboard tones Roland also release a series of 15 ROM cards with the nomenclature SN-U110-xx where the xx was the number of the card 01-15 representing the 15 cards that were released.  These cards were also locked down where the sounds contained therein could not be manipulated.  The cards were also grouped by tone type.

To use a sound on a sound card you had to load the card into the instrument.  While the card was inserted the sound was available to the unit.  There was no way to load the sound from the card onto the unit.  Roland installed 4 PCM ROM slots onto the front of the instrument.  Allow the musician to combine the internal tones with the tones on up to 4 additional PCM ROM cards.

These ROM cards can only be used on the Roland U-110 and the synthesisers that followed it the Roland U-20 and Roland U-220.  And to a limited degree on the Roland D-70.

The samples included in the Roland U-110 were based on the Roland S-50 sample library.  This means that the samples were taken at 12bit resolution.  Which was for the time hi-fi for an instrument that was sold for sub £1,000.

The one downside to this synthesiser is if you plug it into your mixer and turn the fader up you will hear a degree of background noise.  Now on my unit I put this down to age, but I have been told by people that owned these in the late 1980's and 1990's that this was always there.  You do not notice the noise when the tone is playing and should really mute the channel when it is not being used.

I use The Roland U-110 as sound re-enforcement.  And it is obvious that this is how Roland intended the unit to be used.  Providing a left (mono) and right output for the send a mix of all tones generated to the mixer.  There are also a further 6 mono outputs where individual tones can be assigned and sent to separate channels on the mixer.

A further nod to the sound re-enforcement pitch is the fact that the unit can generate 31 separate voices (simultaneous notes).  Why 31 and not 32 voices.  The official Roland explanation is that the unit does have 32-voice capability, but one of the voices must be retained for system ROM functions leaving 31-voices available to the musician.  The 31-voices are simultaneous and therefore if you are layering two tones on top of each other than the number of available voices is halved to 15.

I acquired my Roland U-110 about 15 years ago because I was looking for a tone generator that could just width to the music that I was playing through my sequencer, and I still use it as part of the composition process even if the Roland U-110 does not make it onto the final mix.

The Roland U-110 was superseded by the Roland U-20, a 61-key keyboard, which used the sample PCM sample technology and the Roland U-220 a 1U 19" sound module.  Both released in 1989.