Roland XV-5080 and the Rest of the XV Rack Family

by Chadwick Wood
December 19th, 2018

In what will (probably?) be the last launch of the year for Coffeeshopped, Patch Base 3.3 now supports the Roland XV-5080, XV-3080, XV-5050, and XV-2020. And whew, these were some doozies to tackle (the work started on these months ago), but very worth it.

The beginning of this month saw our launch of editors for the synths that started the JV family, and this month you get support for some of the newest synths in that same family. And they have come a long way. Following in the JV tradition, each voice has 4 tone layers, each with its own pitch, filter, and amp envelopes, (as well as 2 LFOs each). But the XV's have the possibility of two samples for every layer, and they offer 1083 different samples to choose from. The external control options are far more advanced. The XV-5080 and XV-5050 each offer 3 separate effects units with 90 effects to choose from, in addition to a Chorus and a Reverb send, so your multi-timbral Performances can be enormous. Three of them have the traditional 16-part setup, but now, each part can either be a voice or a drum kit. So you can run 16 drum kits at the same time, if you're that into drums. The XV-5080 takes it one huge step further and actually offers 32 parts. The thing has 2 separate MIDI Ins just so you can talk to all 32 parts separately. There are many other improvements in the XV family, but you get the picture.

So, that's a lot of stuff. And Patch Base supports all of it. Create and edit your voice patches, your drum kits, and your performances. Save, swap, and back up your banks. These editors set a new bar for the level of complexity that Patch Base handles, and really opens the XV's up to be used to their full potential. I'm a big fan of the XV-5050 myself (so much power–in 1U of rack space–appeals to my minimalist side), so these editors are a personal win for my home studio.

Here are some screenshots of the different parts of the XV-5080 editor/librarian:

p.s. The XV-5080 also has sampling capability; I need to note that the sampler functions are not currently supported in Patch Base. They're pretty complicated, and you need an external memory source to even use the sampler, so I'm hoping not too many people will miss this part. But, if you're a heavy XV sampler user, please let me know.