The Old Bald Geek's Roland Piano Pages

The Roland FP-60, FP-90, FP-60X, and FP-90X pianos are wonderful instruments: great sound, great feel under the fingers. But a number of features are not well documented, or are clumsy to use. These pages are an attempt to improve the usability of these pianos.

The information on these pages is based on information in the Owner's Manuals and MIDI Implementation Documents, for the FP-60, FP-90, FP-60X, and FP-90X, all available on the Roland website; and on experiments with my FP-90 running software version 1.05. If you get different results on your piano, please let me know what model and software version you have. The software version of your piano may be found via the “Version” (Function 37 on the FP-90).

These pages and the Registration Editor have been updated to support the FP-60X and FP-90X. I only have an FP-90, so please let me know if you find errors or have any problems with support for these pianos.

Please note that the FP-10, FP-30, and FP-30X do not have the Registration feature, so this information does not apply to those pianos.

Editing and Using Custom Registrations

The editable Registrations on the Roland FP-60/90/60X/90X can be very handy, but

• they are a pain to edit using the buttons on the piano
• once you select a Registration, some built-in Tones may not behave the same way as before

These pages attempt to address both issues. For more information, select one of these topics:

• Go to the Registration Editor
• Deciphering and Editing Roland Registration Files
• Side Effects of Using Registrations
• Information about the Tones and their capabilities
• Pedal Usage
• Ideas for Using Registrations
• MIDI Tips
• MIDI Spelunking
• Hardware Notes
• The badly produced YouTube video that started this project.

Deciphering and Editing Roland Registration Files

You can save the piano's current sound, including Tone, single/split/dual mode, ambience, volume, transpose, touch setting, pedal options, and microphone settings to a Registration using the procedure “Saving Current Settings into a Registration” in the Owner's Manual.

This works, but unless you spent a lot of time in video arcades in the mid 1980s, editing the name of the Registration one character at a time is a real pain, and editing the other options are not much better.

You can export the current set of 30 Registrations to a USB drive by using Function 24, “Reg. Set Export”, and import a set of Registrations from a USB drive by using Function 25, “Reg. Set Import.”

If you save a set of Registrations to a USB drive, and then plug the drive into a computer, you will find a file with a name like “REG__001.UPG”, or whatever name you used when you saved the Registrations.

If you open the file with a decent text editor, you should see something like the text shown below. The file has “Linux line endings”, with a line-feed (AKA newline) at the end of each line. If you see a jumble of text wrapping around the screen, it means that your editor wants “Windows (or DOS) line endings” with both carriage-return and line-feed at the end of each line. Many text editors, free and otherwise, can handle the Linux line endings. Notepad2 and Notepad++ are both good choices, but there are hundreds of others. And the version of Notepad included in recent updates of Windows 10 supports Linux line endings, only 25 years later than everyone else.

{
    "title": "PianoRegistration",
    "formatVersion": 2,
    "registrationPedalShift": 0,
    "registration": [
        {
            "name": "ConcertPiano",
            "ambience": 2,
            "keyTouch": 50,
            "keyTranspose": 0,
            "songTranspose": 0,
            "keyboardMode": 0,
            "singleToneMSB": 0,
            "singleToneLSB": 68,
            "singleTonePC": 0,
            ...
            "registrationBankMSB": 0,
            "registrationBankLSB": 0,
            "registrationPC": 0
        }
    ]
}

If you are geek like me, you might recognize this as JSON format.

You certainly can edit this file with a text editor and import the file on the piano. But you will probably find it much easier or use our on-line Registration Editor.

If you decide to go commando and edit the file by hand, note that the file as exported from the piano has exactly 1447 lines: 5 lines of header, 30 sets of 48 lines, one for each Registration, and two final lines. Before you save your changes, make sure that you have exactly 1447 lines. Files edited using the on-line Registration Editor may have more lines if you add notes and comments.

If you mangle the file by omitting a line, missing a quotation mark etc., the piano may show “Error 14” when you try to import it. It can be useful to open the original REG__001.UPG and your edited file and place them side by side to check for differences. Or use a diff utility to compare the files.

Read the details about the items in the Registration file or use the on-line Registration Editor.

Side Effects of Using Registrations

When you select a Registration, 46 parameters are set.

In contrast, when you select one of the built-in Tones, only some of these parameters are set – the remaining parameters retain their previous values. That can result in the selected Tone not sounding like you expect it to.

For example, the default Registration 1-2, “SuperLightSt”, uses the Concert Piano Tone, but sets the keyTouch to 5 – much lighter than the default value of 50. So only a very light touch is needed. “SuperLightSt” also backs off upperVolume from 100 to 60, so the sound doesn't get too loud.

If you select the Registration “SuperLightSt”, and then press “Exit”, or press “Registration” again, the LCD shows “Concert Piano”. But the touch is still set to 5, and the instrument doesn't respond at all like “Concert Piano” usually does.

A useful hack is to reserve one Registration, probably 1-1, to be Concert Piano, resetting keyTouch, upperVolume, lowerVolume, and other parameters to their “normal” states. If you have tweaked your piano to your preferred “normal”, you may need to change the values in this Registration to match your changes.

If I were the Boss (nyuk nyuk) of Roland and could change the software, I would make a couple changes:

1. Switching out of Registration mode would restore whatever Tone and settings were in effect before you entered Registration mode.

2. Most of the items in the .UPG file would be optional: if a parameter was specified, then selecting the Registration would change it in the sound. If a parameter was not specified, then that parameter would not be changed in the sound. I would find this particularly useful for Transpose: if I set Transpose to suit a particular vocalist, it would be nice to be able to switch between Registrations without making a custom set for each transpose amount.

3. “Split” mode has an editable split point. It would be nice if “Dual” mode had one as well, to specify the highest note of Tone 1. Tone 2 would still cover the full range. I would use this mostly to beef up bass parts: on pipe organ sounds, you might set Tone 1 to be the same sound as Tone 2, but down an octave, and have this effect cover only the bottom few octaves where a pipe organ might use a 32-foot coupler on the pedals. Some of the tone-wheel organs sound a little thin in the lower octaves. You could double these octaves with on one of the bass Tones. You can replace the organ sound with a split, but it would be nice to keep the organ sound in there too.

4. The default MIDI receive channel would either be separately editable, follow “MIDI Transmit Channel”, or be fixed at 1 for compatibility with MIDI controllers that can't be edited to send on any other channel. I mean, four?

Pedal Usage

The piano comes with a Roland DP-10. This is an analog pedal that generates a continuous range of values rather than simply on and off like a foot switch. The FP-60 and FP-90 support “half damper” operation, so you can use this pedal to get fine control of the damper (aka hold) effect. I confess that after playing piano for 50 years I never knew there was such a thing as “half damper” until I got my FP-90. (This may be because few of the acoustic pianos I have encountered in my half century have been in good enough shape for the technique to be feasible: if the piano is out of adjustment, some dampers lift and some don't, which John Cage might have enjoyed, but I don't).

If you don't intend to use half damper techniques, you might consider using a simple foot switch as your damper pedal, and connect the DP-10 that comes with the piano as the left or middle pedal. That would let you use the analog pedal for functions like pitch bend, expression, or modulation. See centerPedalFunc and leftPedalFunc above. I use an old Roland switch pedal that is “normally closed”: the switch is closed when the pedal is not depressed. The “Troubleshooting” section of the manual implies that the piano should also accept a normally open pedal. As with most keyboards, any pedal, continuous or switched, must be connected to the piano before you turn the power on so that the piano can detect the unpressed state of the pedal.

If you decide to use a foot switch as a damper pedal, you may want to turn “damper noise” off in Piano Designer. Otherwise, the abrupt off/on pedal transition can cause a funky ghost-on-the-strings effect.

Or buy an RPU-3 and have three luscious analog pedals.

Ideas for Using Registrations

1. As mentioned above, reserve one Registration, probably Piano-1, to be Concert Piano, resetting keyTouch, upperVolume, lowerVolume and other parameters to their “normal” states. If you have tweaked your piano to your preferred “normal”, you may need to change the values in this Registration to match your changes.

2. The Electric Piano Tone 1, “1976SuitCase” is a nice Rhodes® sound, but the stereo ping-pong tremolo makes me nauseous, especially through headphones. You can set modulationSpeed to 0 to disable the tremolo entirely, or set it to something like 80 to give a shimmering sound.

3. Some of the electronic Organ Tones, such as “Combo Jz.Org” sound an octave lower than other Tones. You can certainly move your hands up the keyboard, but you could also make a Dual using the Tone, and use dualTone1OctaveShift to transpose the Tone up an octave. Set lowerVolume to 0, so that the second Tone of the Dual won't be heard. (And yes, I know that Hammond® organs have a 16' drawbar, which may account for the lower perceived pitch. These Tones sound muddy to me when played unshifted, so I prefer the octave shift.)

4. On the other hand, I sometimes find that I want the left Tone of a split to play pitches above the normal splitPoint, or the right Tone to play pitches below the normal splitPoint. You can accomplish this by using the octave shifts to move the left Tone down an octave, or the right Tone up an octave, and adjust the splitPoint (and your hands) to give yourself some more elbow room.

5. One of the chief joys of a Leslie® or Rotary speaker is how the sound changes as the speaker spins up. So whenever I make a Registration that uses one of the orgran sounds that supports the rotary effect, I set the leftPedalFunc or centerPedalFunc to "Rotary on/off," so I can use the pedal to toggle the effect.

6. I have experimented with recording MIDI from the piano, and importing the MIDI file into MuseScore to edit into musical notation. Since the left and right Tones of a split are sent on different MIDI channels, another use of the split-and-shift-octave is to allow the MIDI file to keep your hands on different channels, so you can assign them to different staves in MuseScore.

7. “Harpiness” (Strings, 8) is a nice sound, but the half-second echo effect gets old after about two trips across the canyon, and it isn't affected by modulationSpeed or any other control that I have found. The base sound is pretty much identical to the GM2 Harp (Other, 124), and using a Registration makes it a lot easier to access than 124 presses of “+”. There are a number of other Tones with obnoxious echo, but they don't seem to have exact non-echo equivalents.

8. I have a quiet house and usually play at pretty low volume. Doing this using piano defaults mean that I need to keep the volume faders near the bottom of their ranges, where they can be hard to adjust precisely. By creating Registrations with upperVolume and lowerVolume set to 50 or 80%, I can run the main volume fader higher, using more of its range for easier adjustment.

9. Since the Organ Tones don't respond to keyboard dynamics, they often sound too loud when I switch between piano and organ Tones, necessitating a quick trip to the volume fader. Using a Registration allows upperVolume and lowerVolume for the organ sounds to be set lower than the piano sounds. For example, I might set the upperVolume of piano Registrations to 80%, and upperVolume of the organ Registrations to 50%.

10. you assign the “Layer” function to an analog center or left pedal, the pedal can be used to fade in Layer 2 of a dual. You could use this to bring in string schmaltz on a piano voice. Or you could use the same Tone for both halves of the dual, but set dualOctaveShift up an octave. As you depress the pedal, the sound will become louder and brighter as the octave comes in.

MIDI Tips

Some of the information in this section is in Roland's MIDI guide, and some was determined experimentally. Please inform me of any errors or additions.

• The piano is multi-timbral: you can send it MIDI commands on any of the 16 channels, and it will respond. Each channel can have different Tones, parameters etc.

• The receive channel associated with the piano keyboard is four, rather than the channel one that you might expect. So to use a computer or other MIDI device to change programs or adjust parameters that affect the sound produced when you play the keyboard, you need to send to the piano on channel 4. This is independent of the “MIDI Transmit Channel” that you edit using Function 31: that affects only the channel on which the keyboard sends note and parameter data.

• The value of midiTxCh affects only messages sent by the piano: all notes in Single mode, Right Tone in Split mode, and Tone 1 in dual mode.

• The piano sends on channels 3 for Split Left, and on channel 6 for Dual Tone 2. There doesn't seem to be any way to change these.

• Registration change sends MIDI messages on three channels even if the piano is not in split or dual mode:

  • midiTxCh is the main/right Tone

  • channel 3 is split Left Tone

  • channel 6 is dual Tone 2

• If you send CC, PC, or other messages to the piano on channel 4, they affect the sound produced when you play the piano's keys. But if you send these messages on channel 3 or 6, they do not affect the sounds produced by the piano keys in Split or Dual mode. And note messages received on channel 4 do not cause the split Left or dual Tone 2 to sound: only the tone selected for channel 4. You can send note messages on channels 3 and 6, and they are affected by CC etc. sent on these channels. But received MIDI seems to have no effect on split Left or dual Tone 2.

• If you send MIDI note messages on channels other than 4, the volume is controlled by the “Song Volume” fader. My “sound guy” reflex is to turn down faders for sources that I am not using, so this undocumented use of “Song Volume” had me confused for a while.

• Channel 10 (traditionally used for rhythm) is limited to GM2 sounds – you can't select the main piano Tones etc. The other channels can select any sound bank and program.

• Adjusting Ambience sends CC 91 (Effect 1 Depth) on channels midiTxCh, 3, and 6. But sending CC 91 messages to the keyboard does not change the Ambience of channel 4. CC 91 does affect reverb on other channels, at least for some Tones, but the reverb effect is not the same as the Ambience effect applied to the same Tones on channel 4.

• On most of the electric organ Tones, pressing the “Organ” button again toggles the rotary speaker effect on and off. It also sends MIDI CC12 (Effect Controller 1) to either 0 (off) or 127 (on). You can't do this with the button when you are using a Registration, but you can set rotarySpeed on or off in the Registration, and the rotary toggle can be assigned to left or center pedal using the centerPedalFunc or leftPedalFunc settings.

• You can send CC12 to the piano to change the effects listed above for the Registration item modulationSpeed, or in some cases rotarySpeed. However, when the piano receives CC12 on any channel, it affects CC12 on all channels. This seems like a bug, or at least undesirable.

Note: it may be that some of the above limitations and peculiarities can be avoided by using undocumented SysEx or NRPM control messages. My experiments have been largely limited to items specified in the document “FP-90 / FP-60 MIDI Implementation”, available on the Roland website., and a bit of experimentation.

Here is a table showing the effects of sending MIDI Controller messages to the piano. There are a lot of Tones in this piano, and a lot of options, so I am not able to guarantee complete accuracy. Please inform me of any errors.

MIDI Spelunking

Roland's MIDI Implementation document is pretty minimal, so I wrote a Python program to poke at the piano and find out more. This program is the source of much of the detail in the previous section regarding the use of MIDI "CC" controls.

But clearly the pianos have a lot more MIDI capability: everything that Roland's "Piano Partner" app does to the piano is done via MIDI, apparently using System Exclusive (SysEx) messages. I don't have a way to eavesdrop on either a BlueTooth or USB connection between Piano Partner and the piano, so I extended my Python program to do some spelunking.

My program is available here.

The program is written in Python 2.7, which is the version on the ancient Linux laptop that I used for the investigations, and the version with which I am most familiar. Updates to current versions of Python, or to a more elegant user interface, are left as an exercise for the reader.

Hardware Notes

The microphone jack is TRS. Since the piano's microphone jack has a ring contact, it should also work with a microphone that has a TS cable, with the “ring” side of the piano's differential input connecting to the microphone's ground sleeve.

The TRS pedal jacks have about 3.2 volts on the ring contact relative to the ground sleeve. The Roland analog pedals present about 10 K-ohms between ring and sleeve, and have the pot wiper connected to tip. When ring and sleeve are shorted, as by the TS plug on a simple foot-switch (or a DP-10 in “switch” mode), the piano limits current to a safe value of about 0.7 mA.