I'll be receiving an R880 next week with no additional cards other than a memory card. Am I in for a hell of a steep learning curve before I can get some good reverb from it? I imagine the cards written by Massenburg, Nichols, and others are presets made with discerning ears. How far off will I be without these custom cards? I'm hoping the stock presets are decent enough and can be adjust to (good) taste.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

I know it is mentioned before, but the Lee Quintana programs are awesome. I have it, he live 40 minutes from me, what he has done is to get other great reverbs and trys to make the 880 emulate the other reverbs, I have 4 880's as well as Dynadord DRP20's, KT 870, Yamaha SPX900 that he did custom programs for me on, Ibanez SDR1000, Yamaha REV1 and a EMT 140 and the 880's ROCK, I think I have all of the cards, but I use Lee's patches the most, they really sit nice in a mix.

Just to be sure - do those cards add functions that are not available with the machine only, or are the patches on those cards 'just' the standard possibilities of the machine used in a good way?

In other words, can I get to all of the patches that are on those cards by fiddling around, or do I have limited functionality with the machine only?

(I hope someone understands what I tried to say!)

Hello René,

Those cards contain presets tweaked by named engineers.
For doing so they used the parameters accessible in the R880, which means that you could replicate on principle.

However, in practice I think that would be hard to do, especially with some of GM´s examples. The man seems to have just unique ears.

On the other hand one can sure come to pleasing examples himself provided some time and patience while tweaking.

Hope that answers your question.

Ruphus

Thanks, Ruphus! This answers my question completely.

i have two R880 with controller on sale if some one is interested

Some more questions:

How difficult is it to uprgade from OS 1 to OS 2?

I read somewhere (maybe even in this thread, I'm too lazy right now to check) that those preset cards are only for OS 2.

Also, what is the difference between units running on OS 1 and units with OS 2?

Thanks!

I would be interested to know about that too.

I have a Roland R880 with v1 software.

After a long phone call Roland told me that they still have the chips to upgrade the mainframe but cannot upgrade the remote so I am stuck with v1. As a disclaimer though nobody there seemed to really know an awful lot about the R880, they had to check their database and get back to me.

I was a little disappointed but it is still a great reverb, especially for the £60 it cost me!

Hi Folks,

Gee this thread constitutes one of the main sources of info on the R-880. For anyone who
needs the Paul Lehrman manual it is downloable from Roland UK here,


ftp://ftp.roland.co.uk/productsupport/Manuals/

Hi,Is there anyone who can copy Preset Card?(like GML/Lee Quintana/Roger Nichols/480...)
I have Ram Cards...Please copy them!!!

Hi there,

After the same thing if anyone can help

Cheers
N
Y
M
O

I have one for sale as well. I am in the bay area of California. I have the system card and the M880P card with sounds from Massenburg/nicholes etc..

Jeff E

There is solution for manage R-880 without GC-8:

880SRC Project

Very Interesting. thumbsup
That could probably be the answer to many of our questions on how to manage and swap presets between users as well as having an editor so we can avoid editing with the incovenient GC-8 .
I am going to contact them in order to proceed with a pre-order.
Does anyone know where do they come from ?
Although I read the description I still don't exactly understand what is the communication protocol between the R-880 and the Mac.
Is the 880 USB some kind of Midi to USB adaptor ?
Anyway I 'll email them asking these questions and hopefully they'll let me know.

Hi there,

Yes...i'm interested too.
Not sure about the 880 usb thing either...I think they may be European by the written Spanglish heh

(and I just bought a spare GC 8 !)

Cheers

John NYMO Nyman

I found the answer on the 880 USB thing here :
F.A.Q. (880srcproject)

After looking at the screen shots i think i will stick with the remote.

Programming the R-880 is tricky but the screen shot they came up with makes it nearly impossible. Also the remote has 4 knobs for changing parameters quickly. Doing it in software means one thing at a time. I like the idea for storing presets though.

I had a similar opinion. I usually only adjust one parameter at a time, but I like the page approach that roland used for the R880 remote. To me it just flows nicely from one page to another, whereas the screenshot seems to give you every parameter (or lots of them at least) all on one page.

Also, no windows version...ever? C'mon, it's just a different window interface...the core code would likely be identical. I think I'd be happier with an iPod/iPhone version...

Cheers

Kris

Ah, fond memories!
We had an R-880 at our Uni and at one point I became obsessed with creating an editor for it. Believe me at that time i could decipher sysex in my dreams but that machine had a such obscure implementation for parameter changes it became impossible. I remember having a internal protocol description and all, but it was all too custom, Some commands needed a send-acknowledge structure. Logic had quite a powerful editor creator but it came short and we even began to write a custom software, but later we had to give up for more "productive" stuff!
Cheers

Sorry for the hi-jack but looking to sell my R-880 with 3 cards here on GS for only $700

PMd you.

R-880 users volunteering to exchange preset card settings as a parameter list document?

I would propose to provide same from my R-880 Massenburg preset card.

In order to share inside small R-880 community ...

Hi

I'm thinking of getting a Roland R880.

The problem is it is comes with version 1.
What do I lose by not having version 2?

It also has a problem with the display in the remote (some lines are blank...).
Where can I get a new LCD and how much will that cost me?


Thanks in advance,
Best

Paulo

You can get my R880 with fully working display heh
I don´t even know which Version it is. Anyway I never missed anything with the quality of reverb you can get from a R880

Sent you a message

still available ?

Hi, sag mal hast Du den R880 noch ?

steht der noch zum Verkauf mit v2 Software ?

gruß

Cadde , Hamburg

Hi,
I just bought a Lee Quintana preset card and when I try to some some of the presets on it, the controller screen displays that message "Illegal Data. Can not read", 24 of the 86 presets contained on the card are concerned, all others are loaded correctly.
This message is not mentioned in the user manual.
At boot, the GC screen displays that GC is version 1.02 and R-880 is v.2.
my system card is R88-GC-1 with a sticker R88OGC802.
Do I need to find a v.2 system card or is the preset card I bought faulty ?
thanks

Yes its because your using version 1 software... the user cards only work 100% reliably with version 2 software, that is what your experiencing.

thanks for the quick response. So I'm lucky that more that 70% of the presets are loading ! some are really nice, so I hope I'll find a v.2 system card not too expensive to listen to the rest...