Connecting the Roland S550 Sampler to a VGA LCD Monitor - Sunday 5th July 2015
Why connect an external monitor
As I mentioned in my Why I love my Roland S550 Sampler post, you don 't need to run the S550 through an external monitor to play music but it's pretty much impossible to sample new sounds and edit patches without the help of a display. You can easily hook up a monochrome display but the S550 is far cooler operated in 'full' colour on a 'Digital RGB' screen. So before I tell you how I got my sampler to display on my LCD monitor, I'll try to explain what's going on here ...
RGB, CGA, VGA, ... ?
Just like music, video colour signals come in digital ...

Why I love my Roland S550 Sampler - Sunday 3rd August 2014

Why the S550 is cool (and currently a steal on eBay)
The Roland S550 is a rack mount digital sampler dating from around 1989. It is commonly thought of as a '12 bit sampler' and a rack-mounted version of the S50 sampler without the keyboard. Both of these statements are sort-of true but understate the power of the S550 and why it is superior to the S50.
First up the S550 has twice as much memory as the S50 - so you can load and play the samples from two S50 disks at the same time. Secondly the S550 has an 8-stage enveloped filter with resonance and 8 stage amplifier envelope. This is often confused with the S50 'digital filter' (which the S550 has as well) which is just a way of filtering ...

The Venerable Order of the Freudelheim - Saturday 17th December 2011
Welcome to The Venerable Order of the Freudelheim. A fine upstanding organisation committed to - well, music, basically. As a member of said venerable order you may freely display our crest (as shown below) and share our secret handshake ... once we think of one. Apart from that and some pretty funky merchandise (everyone is clamouring over the Albino Teddy Bear) there are absolutely no benefits of joining ... but membership is free and we're not picky about who joins so no need for any rejection fears or anything like that! As a potential future member, you are probably wondering exactly who (or indeed what) is a Freudelheim? Well, basically it's just me ... with a little help from my friends (you). The name is ...