A composer wanted to choose the sounds on his Roland RD-700SX from inside Cakewalk by BandLab, and I found the patch list file Cakewalk needed on Roland’s own website.
This was one of several questions he asked me in a remote session. He wanted to know how he could use his RD-700SX as a MIDI instrument within Cakewalk. Earlier in the same session we’d tracked down why nothing he played was reaching Cakewalk, which I’ve written up separately in finding a faulty MIDI cable in Cakewalk.
How the RD-700SX and Cakewalk work together
I explained that Cakewalk wouldn’t be playing back the sounds of the keyboard itself. What Cakewalk stores is MIDI data, messages he can record and edit, and when the song plays, Cakewalk sends those messages down the MIDI cable to the RD-700SX, which makes the sound. So he could record his piano on MIDI channel 1, bass on channel 2 and so on, with drums on channel 10, as that’s the standard for General MIDI drum parts.
I showed him how MIDI works, and we talked about how he could use the RD-700SX’s own tone settings to choose the sound for each MIDI channel. He then asked whether, rather than selecting the instruments manually on the RD’s panel, he could have a list of its sounds on his computer and assign a sound to each channel in Cakewalk. I said this was definitely possible, but we would need to install a MIDI patch list in Cakewalk so it knew exactly which sounds were in the RD-700SX and in what order.
Finding a patch list for the RD-700SX
In years gone by, the easiest way to get a patch list file was to find another user who had already made one and download it from their website. People are often very kind and share these files once they’ve made them. Otherwise you might find a patch list inside a librarian or editor program, or, if you were lucky, somewhere else online.
Before we searched, I suggested a fallback in case we couldn’t find one. The RD-700SX’s patch list is in the back of its manual, so we could take that list and an existing Cakewalk patch list file and use AI to put the two together into a new file for his keyboard.
Roland has a tool on its website where you choose your keyboard and the DAW software you’re using, and it generates a patch list file for that exact setup to download.
I found it after a little research, and it saved us making a file at all. I don’t know how Roland are doing this. It’s possibly AI, much like the approach I’d suggested, and if so I applaud them for using modern technology to solve a problem for their users. If they’ve built a large database of patch list files instead, that’s also a very helpful service.
The file Roland’s tool gave us was a .ins instrument definition file, and we imported it into Cakewalk under Preferences > MIDI > Instruments.
My client was happy that he could now select the sounds on his RD-700SX from Cakewalk without navigating the front panel. He can also recall all the sounds he wants for a particular song just by opening that song in Cakewalk. I was happy too, because I could answer his request quickly without programming the patch list myself or setting up an AI to do it.
If you want to choose a Roland keyboard’s sounds by name in your DAW, look on Roland’s website for a patch list file before you go hunting for one or start making your own.
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