Hoo Koo E Koo

I was born in 1973 in Norwalk, Connecticut, but moved to California in 1974 when I was just 18 months old, so I consider myself a native ;) I currently live in Orange Country, CA, with my wife of 23 years and two children, 16 and 18 years old.

I started playing the piano at the age of six. By middle school, I was so sick of piano lessons, I wanted nothing to do with music. I took a two-year hiatus, then discovered guitar my freshman year of high school. I played guitar in a couple of high school bands, jamming at school events, talent shows, and local parties — nothing serious, just garage bands. By my junior year, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in music, and I started looking into getting a music degree.

My grades in high school weren’t that great, so I ended up going to Saddleback Community College for a couple of years, where I earned an AA in Music. During this time my younger brother played the drums, so I started practicing a lot on his kit. I formed a cover band with a couple of other guitar-playing friends (I played the drums), and we started gigging at local bars and clubs. Again, nothing serious, just for fun and free beer.

I worked my butt off and got straight As and Dean’s List at Saddleback and was accepted into the music program at UC Berkeley. Moving to the Bay Area was one of the most important and profound moves of my life, exposing me (and my future wife) to super-diverse music, food, art, and culture that you simply don’t find in Orange County. It was life-changing, to say the least.

While working at Guitar Center Fountain Valley, I met Brian Hooper, my Roland rep. He was the best of the best, always stopping by the store to make sure my crew were trained, the gear was hooked up and demo-ready, and even help customers. It was the late ’90s, and Roland had just released its VS (Virtual Studio) line of portable, all-in-one digital recording systems. I quickly became an expert (certified by Roland in 1997) and sold a bunch of VS-880 and VS-1680 units over the following years. One day I got a call from Brian, and he told me about an opening for a hard disk recording product specialist. I jumped at the opportunity to get the hell out of retail and work for one of the most innovative music technology companies in the world. I got hired on May 8, 2000, and I’ve worked for Roland ever since.

During my days as a product specialist, we formed a regional training team and would go around to all the local music stores to train the crew and help merchandise. The team had a direct impact on sales in the region, so we expanded to the Greater Los Angeles area, but we were still only reaching a fraction of our dealers. We assembled a similar team on the East Coast, but reach was still an issue.

There have been many, but if I had to pick one moment, it has to be when we went live with the 2015 redesign. We had been working on the redesign for over eight months and decided to coordinate the launch with the first day of the 2015 NAMM Show (National Association of Music Merchants), an international music products trade show in Anaheim, CA. After pulling an all-nighter to make sure everything was deployed on time, I remember walking into our tradeshow booth to thunderous applause and high-fives from the entire team. It was an amazing moment.

Keeping everyone connected. I manage a distributed team across two countries and several time zones. Even before Covid, two of the developers were full-time remote, so we’ve been using Zoom, Skype, and Teams for years. But there’s no substitute for true face-to-face interaction. In the past, we’ve held “web summits” in Los Angeles or London where we would fly the whole team in and spend some quality time together, both in and out of the office. I look forward to doing that again in the near future.

The biggest challenge for me and my team is trying to balance local business needs with global vision and strategy. It’s hard to please everyone. Managing expectations and knowing when to compromise is extremely important. At the end of the day, revenue matters, but as we’ve shifted to more of a marketing-led company, getting buy-in from all stakeholders can be challenging. Oh, and localization — I had no idea how much time, resources, and budget goes into creating a fully localized website. We now have an entire translation team!

For sure. You can’t speak to a piano teacher the same way you’d speak to a mobile DJ, hip-hop producer, or beatmaker. As we’ve shifted from more traditional instruments like piano, organ, accordion, and drums, to more production-focused instruments and software synthesizers, we’ve had to tailor our messaging and customer experiences accordingly. For instance, we still maintain a phone support hotline for our key piano dealers since many of their clientele prefer to communicate that way, whereas the younger, more tech-savvy customers are using live chat and email support via the website.

We’re embracing our legacy, which is a relatively new thing for Roland. There’s an entire generation of musicians that may recognize that 808 kick sound, but probably know nothing of the company or story behind it. We have such a huge opportunity to tell the origin stories of these genre-defining instruments. In the past couple of years, we’ve created dedicated web experiences for what we call the “X0X” suite of instruments: TR-808, TR-909, TB-303, and SP-404. We celebrate the sound and culture of each through social media and live events on the corresponding calendar day (e.g., August 8 for TR-808, March 3 for TB-303). They have become a kind of cultural holiday within the community. And Google loves it! These pages rank high organically and allow Roland to control the messaging.

As a graduation present from Saddleback, my dad built me a custom x486 Windows 3.1 PC. It had a whopping 4 MB of RAM (which I doubled to 8 MB for $350) and a 210 MB hard drive. I saved up for my first synth (Roland JV-30) and MIDI interface (Roland MPU-401). I also purchased an early version of Cakewalk that you had to load from floppy disk, and Band in a Box for practicing backing tracks. When I started scoring music, I added Finale to my software arsenal. That rig served me well through college.

My first home studio in Long Beach was ADAT-based. The PCs of the time weren’t fast enough to do multi-track digital recording unless you spent a small fortune. I had the original Alesis ADAT and an analogue 16-channel inline mixer. I started investing in mics and preamps because that was the only way to warm up the harsh 16-bit A/D converters. I used lots of external effects, including reverb, multi-effects, compression, etc., as plug-in effects were still CPU intensive and cost-prohibitive. At that time, I still mixed everything to DAT tape but used the computer for 2-track editing and mastering. CD burners were a novelty and cost $600+ and blank CD-Rs were $10–15 each!

Just after starting for Roland, we had this massive employee sale. The discounts were deep, so I picked up an XV-5080 sound module and a bunch of expansion cards. I also got a VS-2480, the flagship 24-track digital recorder and mixer, that became the centrepiece of my production studio. Being surrounded by electronic musicians at Roland drastically impacted my musical tastes and production style. Having literally thousands of new sounds sparked a prolific period of writing and experimentation. From lush orchestral scores to lo-fi beats, to hard house, I was eager to explore and emulate the writing and production styles of many new genres. The XV-5080 had an “R-BUS” port, which allowed eight discrete assignable outputs to connect digitally to the mixer and computer. It was a perfect fusion of hardware and software, and I’d made the jump to an all-digital workflow.

After having two kids and downsizing the studio, I’m mostly “in the box” now. I’m spoiled with a Roland Cloud Ultimate subscription that gives me access to over 50 virtual instruments and hundreds of patches, patterns, and sound expansions. I now use Ableton Live 11 with a Roland A-300PRO as a MIDI controller, and Roland MX-1 as a mixer/audio interface. The studio is literally three cables: USB from A-300PRO to Mac, USB from MX-1 to Mac, line out to studio monitors. Gone are the days of patch bays, tangled cables, and messy desks. The only piece of hardware I still use regularly is the Roland Boutique SE-02, a small analogue mono-synth collab with Studio Electronics. It’s one of the only pure analogue synths Roland has made since the ’80s!

The rise of expressive virtual instruments and plugin effects, combined with powerful yet affordable computers and new tactile input devices/controllers, has made the biggest impact on music production. There were a few breakthrough products and technologies along the way that disrupted the status quo, like Elastic Audio (or REX files), AutoTune’s graphical editor, Celemony Melodyne’s MIDI-like audio manipulation, Serato’s Digital Vinyl System, and uber-realistic hardware effects emulations, to name a few. But each of those advancements has done two things: put more power into the hands of more producers and sparked a new wave of creativity.

Heh, I wonder how Billy Eilish would answer that question. She produced a GRAMMY Award-winning album in her bedroom! In all seriousness, I think it’s a double-edged sword. I’m all in favour of making technology accessible to the masses, but I’ve also noticed a decline in production quality across some genres. I think it’s more noticeable in more jam-centric music like rock and jazz where you need the big studio dynamic to capture the live, real-time interactions and synergy between multiple musicians. That doesn’t happen in a bedroom. But for me, and the thousands of other amateurs/semi-pro producers out there, it’s made music better, simply by allowing more ideas to come to fruition.

A closely related, and perhaps more significant topic, is the democratization of music distribution. Unlike physical media, digital downloads, and now streaming services have enabled musicians and producers everywhere to publish their own catalogues and bypass the traditional “record deal” paradigm. My son even has a couple of piano tracks on Apple Music and Spotify.

Analogue warmth is a glorious thing. Whether it comes from tape saturation, an overdriven vacuum tube, or vintage analogue components, very few will argue that analogue just sounds better. Analog gear, on the other hand, is a different beast. So many gear junkies lust for analogue synths and drum machines without realizing the quirks and idiosyncrasies of true analogue instruments. Because the components were not manufactured to exacting standards and were often sourced from different suppliers, it wasn’t uncommon to have two of the same synth or drum machine sound dramatically different. Heat, humidity, phase of the moon (kidding) all made these instruments very temperamental. But it’s this very thing that also makes them so sought after, even today.

Back to the question of the analogue gear trend — I don’t think it’s necessarily a trend, but we have seen a recent spattering of analogue offerings from the likes of Korg, Arturia, Elektron, and Behringer. But predating this trend, Moog, Novation, Dave Smith, and Sequential (among others) have been producing analogue instruments consistently for many years/decades. It’s just a very niche market.

Roland has taken a different approach to analogue with its ACB (Analog Circuit Behavior) technology found in the AIRA line, Boutique modules, and Legendary software synths. Rather than try and source old, expensive, hard-to-find analogue components, the engineers at Roland decided to model them, down to the transistor and diode level, to recreate the analogue sound without the fuss or price tag. That’s not to say we don’t make analogue gear. The SE-02 Boutique and entire SYSTEM-500 line is pure analogue, and the JD-XA and JD-Xi synths both have analogue voices.

I’m seeing a lot of small, modular and very “playable” production tools making their way into portable rigs and production studios everywhere. A few years back, the Teenage Engineering OP1 turned heads with its compact and playful layout. Korg released the Volca series, and Roland released its Boutique line. And more recently, Roland reintroduced its legendary GROOVEBOX to a new generation of producers and beatmakers.

Other companies, such as Ableton, Novation, Arturia, and Native Instruments have pushed the envelope with tactile pad-based controllers. It’s rare I walk into a modern production studio without seeing a Push or Launchpad on the desk next to the MIDI controller keyboard.

I think this trend of small, affordable, specialized production tools will continue into the foreseeable future. At NAMM 2021, Roland debuted its VERSELAB MV-1, an all-in-one production tool to help you capture, refine, and finish your ideas — quickly

Wireless will be big. We’ve already seen MIDI evolve from using 5-pin DIN cables (traditional MIDI “cables”) to MIDI over USB, and more recently MIDI over Bluetooth and WiFi. The tech is finally catching up, and the latency times are so low they are virtually unnoticeable.

And this will lead to more connectivity. More connectivity between remote locations, as we’ve seen during the pandemic with apps like Facebook’s Collab. More connectivity between instruments, devices, and computers as the “Internet of Things” continues to evolve. And more connectivity between inspiration, idea, and final output.

More vocal processing and manipulation, less AutoTune. More electronic guitar (e.g., guitar synths, XY touchpads, etc.), less electric guitar. More compact hybrid drum kits, fewer monster drum racks. More power duos, fewer traditional bands. More DJs and beatmakers playing self-produced tracks, fewer traditional club DJs. More keyboardists going out into the audience (via wireless MIDI), fewer drummers stuck on risers. More music technology being taught in school, fewer traditional home piano lessons.

This article is based on an interview with Joe Sparacio, Global Web Manager at Roland Corporation.

Interviewer: Joe Foxton
Visual curation, layout & final touches: Justyna Cyrankiewicz