Roland Corporation

The Roland Corporation was founded in 1972 by Ikutaro Kakehashi, initially in Osaka, Japan, with an additional sales office in Tokyo, Japan. Roland effectively grew out of Kakehashi’s first company, Ace Electronics, which was formed in 1960 and focused on combo organs, guitar amplifiers, and effects pedals. With its multiple notable contributions, Roland products are revered today as among the most influential and innovative. The firm’s first efforts came in the form of the TR-33, TR-55, and TR-77 drum machines, followed by the SH-1000 synthesizer in 1973. That same year, the factory in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, was completed and the MEG Electronics Corporation, which would later become the BOSS Corporation, a subsidiary that exclusively produces effects pedals, was established in Osaka. The remainder of the 1970s saw the production of an electric piano, the SH-2000 monophonic synthesizer, the iconic RE-201 Space Echo tape delay of 1974, the Jazz Chorus (JC) guitar amplifier series, the System 700 modular synthesizer, the CE-1 chorus ensemble pedal (which was the first released under the BOSS brand), the GR-500 guitar synthesizer, the highly innovative CR-78 drum machine of 1978 (essentially one of the first programmable, microprocessor-based units of its kind), the SH-2 synthesizer, and the VP330 vocoder. Perhaps the firm’s most lauded and desirable products, however, emerged in the 1980s, including the TR-808 drum machine of 1980, the polyphonic Jupiter-8 hybrid synthesizer of 1981, the TB-303 of 1982, the Juno-60 of 1982, the TR-909 drum machine of 1984, and the D-50 of 1987. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Roland also established sales partnerships throughout Europe and Asia. Their range of products continues to expand into the modern era, with more recent forays into software synthesis and digital emulations of earlier systems. Roland was also pivotal in the development of the MIDI protocol: pioneered by synthesizer designer Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits, and with the help of Kakehashi, Tom Oberheim of Oberheim Electronics, and representatives from Korg and Kawai, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface was consecrated at NAMM in 1983 with a Jupiter-6 and a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 making the first successful connection.