Roland RD-1000
A digital piano that sold for £2,499 in Britain while the same shops were pushing polysynths for a third of that. The keyboard underneath the price tag was the whole point.
Overview
The number that stops an enthusiast cold is £2,499. That's what British dealers were asking for the RD-1000 in the mid-1980s. It was not a bargain instrument, and nobody at the time pretended otherwise. Roland's position was that a digital piano should feel like a piano before it sounds like one, and the price reflected that.
For that money buyers got an 88-note keyboard with fully weighted wooden keys. These are not plastic keys with a weight glued underneath. It's a wooden keybed built to mimic the mass and leverage of an acoustic action. Roland paired it with 16-note polyphony and its SAS sound generation, the chip technology the company was promoting in the trade magazines as its answer to the central problem of digital pianos: that pressing a key and hearing a recording of a piano is not the same thing as playing a piano. A period advertisement in Mix (February 1988, p.37) framed SAS as an attempt to "re-create" the chain of felt hammer, string, and vibration rather than simply sample its output, and named the RD-1000 alongside the RD-300S and RD-250S as the instruments built around that chip.
The feature set reads modestly now. MIDI is present, as it had to be by the time this piano shipped. There are chorus and tremolo effects, and according to Recording Engineer (June 1986, p.111), settings for those effects could be entered and stored. That's handy on a gigging instrument, since a player could recall a favored tremolo depth between sets rather than dialing it in by ear each night. The same review describes the weighted wooden action as touch-sensitive, which separates this instrument from the slab pianos around it. A touch-sensitive weighted action in 1986 was not a commodity. It was the reason the RD-1000 cost what it cost.
Roland's own advertising billed the RD-1000 as "the most realistic and economical digital piano yet," with the 16 voices, 88-note keyboard, and MIDI listed as the headline facts. That's marketing copy, so read it as such. The dealer listings tell a consistent story, though: the RD-1000 sat at the top of Roland's digital piano offerings, with the MKS20 module sold as the same facilities without the keyboard at £1,199, roughly half the price. Anyone who wanted the sound could buy the module. Anyone who wanted the feel had to pay for the keybed.
The RD-1000 is a first-generation instrument. It was one of the earliest serious attempts to put a genuinely piano-like action under a digital sound source, and one of the first places where the SAS chip that powered Roland's whole digital piano line appeared. Collectors and players who have spent time with one tend to talk about the action first and the sound second. That's the reverse of how most digital instruments of the period were evaluated.
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