When Roland released the D-70 in 1990, they were betting that musicians wanted something different from the workstation trend sweeping the market—a pure synthesizer with serious sound design chops and no sequencer to distract from playing. It turned out to be a gamble that didn't quite pay off commercially, but the machine itself remains a fascinating bridge between the beloved D-50 and the sample-based synths that would define the decade.
The D-70 pairs a sample playback engine with the same resonant time-variant filters that made the D-50 legendary, giving you low-pass, high-pass, and band-pass filtering with real character. You get 30 voices of polyphony across a 76-note keyboard with velocity and aftertouch sensitivity, plus a unique Loop Modulation feature that lets you reshape waveforms in creative ways. The synth is 6-part multitimbral with five synth parts and one dedicated drum part, and it includes onboard percussion sounds mapped across all 76 notes. Four assignable faders on the left panel let you control parameters like cutoff, resonance, attack, and release in real time, and they send MIDI data too. The reverb, chorus, and flanger effects are solid, and you can expand the sound library using two PCM card slots on the back. Storage includes 128 patches, 128 tones, 64 performances, and 10 user sets in internal memory, plus support for RAM cards.
The D-70 was overshadowed by workstations from Korg and Yamaha that offered sequencers and more comprehensive feature sets, which limited its appeal at launch and kept sales modest compared to its D-50 predecessor. That said, the community has come to appreciate what it does well—the filters are genuinely excellent, the real-time fader control makes it expressive for live play, and the combination of samples and synthesis creates a distinctive sonic palette. It's a synthesizer that rewards exploration and sounds particularly good for strings, pads, and bass work, though some users note that the drum samples can't be filtered, which is a missed opportunity.
