Roland A-880 MIDI Patcher / MIDI Mixer

Roland released the A-880 in 1988 to meet a demand to provide better control over the MIDI studio. The Roland A-880 was released as the MIDI Patcher / MIDI Mixer.  While both descriptions provide a good insight on what this unit does, the latter is a more accurate description.

​

The Roland A-880 was a 1U rack mount unit designed to fit into the MIDI patch bay enclosure of the musicians MIDI studio setup.  It could also fit easily into the touring musicians tour racks to control multiple instruments, as it was not uncommon at the time for the keyboard player to have 3, 4 or more keyboards on stage and a number of tone modules supporting them. 

​

The Roland A-880 has 8 MIDI inputs and 8 MIDI outputs, one of the inputs and one of the outputs is situated on the front of the unit with the rest on the rear.  The unit is deigned to allow the user to route MIDI signals from any of the inputs to 1 or more of the outputs allowing multiple instruments to be controlled simultaneously.  

​

Once the patching the Roland A-880 had been setup this could then be saved to the memory on the unit for later recall.  At the time you could not set the unit up using a computer.  Over the years a number of utilities have been written that allow the unit to be setup using a visual interface and then save this to the unit for use.