Roland MP-600 Electronic Piano
A 64-note electronic piano that Roland's own advertising billed as having "newly-developed Weighted Action" - and which a San Francisco dealer was still moving for $699 with a case as late as 1980.
Overview
The MP-600 is a 64-note electronic piano. The most useful thing anyone wrote about it appeared in Sound-Arts (December 1978, p.40). The reviewer framed the appeal as a question: what's so good about a mechanical action? The answer, as that piece put it, is touch - the harder you hit the keys, the louder the sound, rather than the constant-volume situation you get from a purely electronic keyboard. That is the MP-600's whole idea. It is not a synthesizer pretending to be a piano. It is an electronic piano built around a mechanical action so the dynamics behave the way a player's hands expect.
Roland's own advertising, in a Sound-Arts spread (March 1979, p.25), grouped the MP-600 with the JP-4 polyphonic synthesizer as part of its "newest line of Professional Keyboards." The JP-4's headline features were Computer Memory, Multi-Mode Key Assign and Arpeggiator. The MP-600's were Variable Voicing, Six-Band Graphic EQ and that "newly-developed Weighted Action." This is marketing copy, not an independent verdict. But it shows what Roland thought it was selling. The MP-600 was the serious pianist's entry in a lineup otherwise aimed at synthesists, and voicing control, onboard EQ and weighted keys are the feature set of an instrument meant to be played, not programmed.
The surviving documentation makes clear how long the thing stayed on the market. A dealer listing, apparently from a Bay Area music retailer's inventory sheet, offers a "Roland MP600 w/case" at $699. The same sheet prices a Hammond B Series 400 at $850 and an ARP four-voice piano at $1195. That puts the MP-600 in the middle of the pack: cheaper than the ARP, close to the Hammond, and sold as a package with its case rather than as a bare instrument. Dealers don't keep listing a keyboard for years if it isn't moving. The gap between the 1978 review and the 1980 dealer sheet suggests the MP-600 had a real commercial life rather than a one-season cameo.
The parts documentation is where the MP-600 gets interesting for anyone who owns one. The service literature references a "RUBBER FOOT MP-600" (part 12359104) as a shared component across Roland's cabinet hardware, and a "MP-600 Cushion" (part 22267211) that turns up in the DP-6 pedal assembly. The DP-6 pedal is noted as a standard accessory for countries outside Japan, which tells you the MP-600 shipped as a system in export markets - piano plus pedal - rather than as an a la carte keyboard. Owners hunting for a replacement pedal today are hunting for a part that was, in most of the world, supposed to be in the box.
The 64-note range is the spec that will divide people. Sixty-four keys is not a full piano. It is roughly five octaves, and it means the MP-600 was conceived as a stage and studio instrument rather than a practice-room replacement for an upright. For a working player in 1978, that was a reasonable trade - you got the weighted action and the dynamics without hauling a hundred-plus pounds of acoustic piano to the gig. For a collector now, it makes the MP-600 a specialist piece.
Condition and parts availability are the practical concerns. The MP-600's service documentation lists rotary potentiometers in several values - 100KB, 20KB, 10KBx4 - plus a rotary switch, slide switch, jacks, and an XLR-type connector among the replaceable components. That is good news for a repairer. These are standard-format parts, not custom silicon, and a unit with a scratchy pot or a dead jack is fixable. The bad news is the mechanical action itself. A weighted action is a collection of moving parts, and moving parts wear. Buyers should expect to evaluate key feel carefully and to budget for a technician who understands mechanical keybeds, not just someone who can recap a power supply.
There is one persistent confusion. A 1978 Sound-Arts item refers to "the new Roland MP-6000" in the same breath as the mechanical-action description, while the dealer sheet and the parts lists both say MP-600. Whether that was a typo in the original copy or an internal model designation that never made it to the badge, the available documentation doesn't say. The mechanical-action electronic piano described in that review and the MP-600 in the parts lists are the same instrument. The feature set matches, the era matches, and no other Roland piano of the period fits.
For a collector, the MP-600 sits in an odd but appealing corner. It is not a Jupiter, not a Juno, not a TB-303 — it will never be the Roland that gets the headlines. What it is, according to the documentation, is a 64-note weighted-action electronic piano that Roland sold for at least a couple of years, shipped with a pedal in export markets, and built from serviceable off-the-shelf components. That combination — real dynamics, a manageable key count, and a parts list a technician can actually work from — is a more interesting proposition than a lot of the era's electronic pianos, and it is the reason the MP-600 still turns up in dealer inventories and player conversations decades after it left the catalog.
Similar items on eBay
No exact Roland MP-600 listings are live right now — these searches show current Roland and similar vintage synth gear on eBay:
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.