80’s Synth Riffs - Roland BK9 arranger keyboard (Medley)

80’s Synth Riffs - arranger styles, created at home on my Roland BK9

0:08 The Final Countdown
1:24 Knight Rider
2:05 Axel F
3:07 Rockit
3:50 Ghostbusters
4:47 Jump

MORE INFO:
Played live in real-time on the Roland BK9
Recorded straight from the keyboard
No multi-tracking, sequencing, or mastering

The left-hand accompaniment parts for the tunes in this medley were too varied and complex to fit in to the BK9’s maximum 4 variations per Style, so right from the outset, I had to approach putting this medley together by creating a separate Style for each song. I used the same drums (Power Kit) on every Style though to maintain conformity throughout the medley. I then utilised the BK9’s Performance List function to create a Performance memory for each Style and saved them consecutively in a Performance List so I could “step” through the individual tunes by simply hitting +1 on the up/down button underneath the jog wheel. The only downside was the small glitch/timing errors that the BK9 tends to throw up when changing a Performance while still playing the previous Performance. To be fair, I was asking the BK9 to load in an absolute ton of data while still playing it at the same time so its internal processor was under a quite bit of pressure I suppose.

I used the Performance “hold” function to force the BK9 to change UP1 & UP2 whenever I changed Performances. This meant that a one button press changed the Style AND the right-hand sounds both at the same time. This worked really well and the only time I had to use an OTS (OneTouchSetting) was for Axel F because it uses two different right-hand sounds, one for the main riff and one for the rhythmic part in the middle. [*Edit - Apologies for the less than authentic Axel F main right-hand sound! Since uploading this video I’ve managed to create a much more authentic sound for the main Axel F riff by adding a square wave layer , a light phaser FX, and some eq tweaks to give it more of that 12-bit clean metallic kinda quality of the original]

The Styles for Final Countdown, Knight Rider, Rockit, and Jump were pretty straightforward to create. However I struggled to get the patterns for Axel F and Ghostbusters to sound right when I changed chords with my left hand. So after spending far too much time trying to force the bass notes to fall in to the right places (and failing miserably at it), I admitted defeat and decided to create 4 bar sections for Axel F and Ghostbusters and incorporate their chord changes in to the accompianments' 4 bar patterns. Not ideal and a bit of a workaround, but ultimately it sounds much better doing it that way.

As usual, all the right-hand sounds for the riffs took quite a bit of tweaking to sound the way I wanted them because the Roland BK9 isn’t a proper synthesizer, but I think I managed to get them quite close. Most sounds were pretty straightforward to create as the BK9 had no shortage of good stock preset sounds that suited. The only right-hand sound that I would say gave me a little bit more work than the others was “Rockit” [*Edit - and Axel F], but I eventually found a good oscillator sync type sound for “Rockit” and when I added some small room reverb to it, it ended up sounding not too bad.

Enjoy!