REVIEW – Roland Piano Designer iOS App – 2022 editing software

The iOS device can be connected with Roland Bluetooth wireless piano technology. In my opinion this new Roland designed “tuning” App is by far one of the most versatile, intuitive, useful, well designed, and visually pleasing apps I have seen for a digital piano in terms of being able to customize and fine tune the acoustic piano sound to your specific tastes. Why would anybody want to do that when all of these new higher priced Roland digital pianos already sound good using their built-in piano sounds? Why would anyone want to design their own piano sounds in this way? Keep reading to find out:). (click on pictures for larger view).

Although the Roland digital pianos are built to have pleasing acoustic piano sounds available at the touch of a button on the piano itself, doing some customized editing can make that piano sound become even more realistic and pleasing depending on what you like and the way your ears hear sound, which is different for everyone. Most, but not all of the new Roland digital pianos have the ability to edit the piano sound from within the piano itself using the buttons and LCD screen on the piano control panel. But doing this entails using the smaller control panel buttons and LCD screens to make these editing changes and in reality that kind of editing can be a bit cryptic or unintuitive, so many people don’t use these extra editing features because of those reasons. When that happens then they loose out on what these editing (custom) features can really do for them and their music. 

But now with the Roland Piano Designer iOS App for your iPad, iPhone, as well as connecting with Android, you can easily design your own custom piano sound or use Roland pre-designed tunings within the App right on your device touch screen using this functional and attractive graphics technology which will give you more control than ever in tweaking the acoustic piano sounds in ways you never imagined. It’s just like hiring an experienced piano technician to work on your piano without the cost and time involved and you get to do it all yourself without the years of piano technician training!

I have used this new Piano Designer App a number of times and some of the very cool things you can do to your new Roland piano is to adjust (in the virtual realm) the acoustic piano sound and the way it resonates inside the piano cabinet, the way the sound resonates and is heard through a piano soundboard, the way the strings resonate, the harmonics (overtones) of the strings, the resonance that happens within the strings when the damper pedal is used, the key touch and response time to your personal touch (100 different incremental settings), the ambiance or natural sound echo within the piano cabinet, the brightness or mellowness of the piano sound, the overall tuning of your piano, and the way the piano sound is heard through headphones. All of these adjustment are done with the touch of your finger using a virtual slider control or a +/- button on your iPad to change the setting quickly and easily.

As a virtual Piano Designer, you can also control or adjust any individual note within the 88 notes of the piano keyboard which includes changing the actual character or tonality of an individual note. This is what professional piano technicians do in acoustic pianos where they make physical adjustments to the actual felt of the hammer so that the hammer will strike the string with a softer or harder felt material which in turns changes the way the string vibrates and the way the sound comes out of that individual string or combination of strings. Softening or hardening the felt of a piano hammer in a real piano can have a dramatic effect on the piano sound you hear and in the Roland piano you have 10 levels of dynamic virtual tonal adjustment for each string using the Piano Designer App. 

If you take 88 notes and multiply that number by 10 different tonal adjustments for each note, you have a total of 880 total tonal adjustments that could be done and saved into a memory so that when you get your “perfect piano sound” it is recalled instantly when you power up the piano the next time. There are even factory “preset” piano tunings for Concert Classical, European Classical, Jazz, etc, so that you can get an instant setup rather than you do it all yourself. Once you select that preset tuning and setup, you can then further tweak that preset setting in any number of ways using the editing parameters on the app.

Finally, this Piano Designer App allows the user to not only adjust the master tuning of the piano but to also set up and adjust the the tuning temperaments in 8 different tuning modes including historical Werckmeister, Meantone, Kimberger, Pythagorean, etc. The key of these temperaments can also be changed to any of the 12 standard keys from C to B. These historical or alternate tunings allow the player to recreate the actual piano-keyboard tunings that famous historical composers used at the time. In the distant past, different tunings (temperaments) were needed because of the type of piano-keyboard construction in those days or the string length and material of strings utilized, or because of the tonal scales most accepted in those musical periods. So this Piano Designer App allows you to hear what the composers and musicians of past centuries were hearing at the time….which is pretty cool.

If you decide to purchase and own one of the new Roland digital pianos, the Roland Piano Designer App is not something that everyone will need or use. If you do use it and are afraid you might “mess things up” when adjusting all these features of the app…don’t worry because you can always reset everything back to the way it was before you made the changes:). It’s pretty full-proof and as I mentioned before, easy to use even if you are not very computer or iPad literate. The Piano Designer App does need to be operated from the later iPad OS 7 or 8 and can also be controlled by iPhone and iPod touch…although I do recommend iPad for a better visual user experience. 

This App has more  features than what I mentioned in this review, but this will give you a pretty good idea of what to expect out of this App when using one of these Roland digital pianos connected wirelessly with Apple iOS. I believe that these kinds of iPad apps along with other technology resources that help with using these digital pianos to a much fuller extent is just the beginning of what is to come in the future. But for now, Roland along with Kawai, Yamaha, and Casio seem to be leading the way in this area.  

If you want more info on new digital pianos and LOWER PRICES than internet discounts, please email me at tim@azpianowholesale.com or call direct at 602-571-1864.