The free Giulioz RdPiano emulates vintage 80s Roland and Rhodes MKS digital pianos.
Vintage SA-Synthesis (structured adaptive synthesis) e-pianos are all over 80s hit records, yet aren’t emulated as often as instruments like Yamaha’s DX7 or Roland’s TR-808 drum machine.
Italian developer Giulioz is changing that with the free RdPiano plugin for macOS and Windows.
RdPiano emulates classic models, like the Roland MKS-20, RD1000, and the Rhodes MK-80 electric piano.
Roland acquired the Rhodes name in 1987 and released the MK-80 and MK-60 in 1989. Roland only maintained ownership for a decade and returned the Rhodes trademark to Harold Rhodes in 1997.
There have been more changes since then, but those MK models are pretty rare, and RdPiano is a chance to add that wonderful sound to your setup without the cost.
RdPiano simulates the CPU-B board used in these models, emulating the CPU and custom chips. Giulioz got the 6800 CPU emulation code from MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), who reverse-engineered the VLSI custom chips containing Roland’s harmonic/velocity sound analysis algorithm.
Giulioz used silicon analysis of the custom chips to reproduce the most authentic sound.
The sound quality is fantastic; the Roland sounds have that legendary percussive character and can sometimes be quite dreamy.
These sounds are a throwback to 80 pop hits and TV shows, especially with simple stabbing chord patterns.
The MK-80 also has a percussive sound, but it’s lush when held beyond the initial impact.
Giulioz has done an outstanding job of recreating these keyboard sounds with such precision.
With that in mind, the developer acknowledges one or two bugs, such as patches initially producing no sound. This issue is typically resolved by changing the patch back and forth.
We aren’t short of free piano plugins, like Sound Dust’s Drift Free Bad Pianos, and we aren’t short of 80s sounds, like Acustica’s Thing TH2.
But I’m glad to see these vintage keyboards get their time in the virtual spotlight, thanks to Giulioz.
RdPiano is available in AU and VST formats for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows.
It also runs in standalone mode.
Kudos to our friend Tom from Synth Anatomy for spotting this freebie!
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53 Comments
OP
onTerribly buggy. Doesn’t work in FL or Reaper. It takes up 17 GB of virtual memory at start and freezes daw.
Freddy
onIn FL Studio, mark the “Use fixed size buffers” option in the Trouble shooting tab of the plug in window.
That fixed the weird sound for me.
The sounds are too cheesy to delete this plug in ;-)
Alex Cremers
onIt makes Cubase crash.
phil huston
onHoly Crap! These things sounded like breaking glass. Elton John used them driven by a MIDIed Yamaha grand. I talked to the Yamaha tech who voiced that piano every night for no reason because the lid went down, no mic, and the piano sound was the MKS. Billy Joel’s piano tech told me the EJ people were worried about the MKS going out and not being replaceable and considered sampling it. This was maybe 2004? I asked why and was told “She likes it. Go figure.” The only thing more awful than the MKS was the divide pianos from Yamama and Roland and the Italians. Good Gawd, y’all. It might be free but plenty of us would happily pay the developer to lose the code.
Frits van Zanten
onWorks fine over here, Ableton (apart from the mentioned bug requiring to change the preset). The preset-knob is a bit unwilling or too eager, a bit unpredcitable. But so seems my mouse the last days. BTW, when I clicked ‘tune’ it was on 442 HZ. CPU 19% according to Ableton, that’s relatively much.
However, after writing the above, moving the GUI made my PC kind of stall, mouse still worked (= moved) but nothing responded anymore (clicking did not do anything). I pulled the cable out of the audio interface and then I could click things again.
So save your work before you try this.
Giambattista
onUnfortunately, it doesn’t load in Bitwig.
Metadata unreadable (apparently).
Mark
onI can confirm that it crashes Reaper – in my case Reaper Linux and the plugin bridged via wine / yabridge.
Dexter U.S.
onI didn’t get sound at first then I had hit the tune button and started to hear something then after that was working fine. maybe it needs to default to a certain bank if possible. I was using cakewalk to test it.
Jay Lane
onLovely but crashes frequently on Ableton 12.
shane
onAbleton-crashed 3 times, trying to do anything.. be good if there was some sort of quality control/testing before posting very buggy stuff like this .. back to the drawing board Rd! (Research & development?)
Brenny C
onBugs are a fairly common thing with software releases, shane. Do try to relax. I’m sure in time it will be fixed. Until then: breathe. All will be ok.
Bob
onAre all these crashes happening in Windows? I wonder if it’s been built with JUCE 8. That added some graphics acceleration stuff that has been causing problems on Linux and Windows.
I built Linux versions with JUCE 7 and am not having any issues here (limited testing).
Frits van Zanten
onThis seems in accordance with my experience that everything went well until I moved the GUI (as well as with the jumpiness of the big knob).
Mark
onyes, I noticed that (very generally speaking) that JUCE (8) stuff is causing a lot more problems / crashing plugins / no GUI redraw problems on my setup – which is Linux running a windows emulation vie wine and bridging the windows plugins via yabridge into reaper. Most things runs rock solid e.g. all the NI stuff, Arturia and Teenage Engineering, Vital, Surge, Crow Hill.
Pedrodeni
onIt works for me in Reaper
Satya
onI bettervuse Roland legacy collection that was given for free
Frits van Zanten
onRoland is not known for giving thing for free. So how does one get a Roland Legacy Collection?
Bob
onWhen it was discontinued, you could freely download it from the Roland Cloud Manager. However, it was later removed from RCM so you can’t download it anymore.
Frits van Zanten
onThank you for your reply. It sounded too good to be true 😉
Calidreads
onIt makes Cubase and Sequoia crash. :-/
Thomas M
onIt works for me in Bitwig and in Reaper. However in Bitwig it seems to be a bit unstable (sometimes it says plugin crashed)
My OS is Windows 11.
Richard
onIt doesn’t crash my FL Studio (v24.1.2) and plays, but all presets crackle (tried ASIO buffer sizes from 16 to 2048, no underruns).
Richard
onIt does crash FL Studio when I delete it in the rack.
avilla
onGuys, i fix the buggy problem with window’s CMD. i copy/pasted in google this particular error thats show me in the Fl’s bug windows: nvwgf2umx.dll
and i wrote in the cmd this: sfc/scannow
fix my win problems and the plug works smoothly.
This was my error. idk if is your error and i don’t responsable if something will happend in your PC.
regards!
Frits van Zanten
onHi, I guess you are GiulioZ, the developer (I can’t see it from the name).
I tried your new version (kudos for speed), but now I have a latency of about 1 second or so in the GUI of Ableton, it has become very very slow (it took me some time to realize what was (not) happening). Live10 W10, i7, 16GB.
I do like the sound.
Your last sentence might benefit from a better translation, I guess 😉
As far as I understand it, it is not so easy to know beforehand who is making or has made a mistake.
avilla
onoh no dude, i’m a random person in the globe lol
in my case was that i said for fix my problems. those wer:, crackles even in 2048 buffer size and then the vst closed Fl every time.
regards.
avilla
onand btw i’m not an english speaker and i’m not use translate for improvement :D
Frits van Zanten
onSilly me 😉
avilla
onno problemmm
Paramita
onWhy bother trying with this? There are plenty of better keys alternatives, Spitfire, Labs, Komplete start etc…
avilla
onto be with a flow of interest and knowledge
i have analog lab, Luna bundle complete etc etc.
are a lot of reasons for do something.
regards.
JP
onIt’s not fair…
1) it was a version 0.2 in test, actually you can download the 0.4 – the developer takes care of his plug-in, bravo
2) it’s an instrument with his own character, not comparable to others (and excellent) modelled or sampled electric piano… apples and oranges are not the same
3) I appreciate anybody who bring something positive to the world
avilla
onamen
alex
onAgreed. Criticism is always welcome and can help devs to make things better, but disqualifying someone’s work isn’t criticism, especially when we’re talking about people who make their work available to anyone for free.
Mark
on@ Alex. Well said. Amen.
Paramita
onAlright, You’re all probably right. I guess I’m getting too sarcastic at the amount of plugins coming out, especially many really aren’t cutting the mustard (like yet another boring EQ or compressor).
But this rompler could be useful to some indeed. Good luck to the dev ~ enjoy :D
alex
onJust keep in mind that it’s exactly indie devs and small companies that have been providing us with free and affordable plugins and made the prices of commercial ones drop so much over the last couple of decades ;) Also, it’s not exactly easy for them to test the plugins in all the different platforms and DAWs. Yes, the market is over-saturated and actually has been for some time now and that can be annoying at times, but people still make great things and will probably keep doing so. I think we should give them some credit, appreciate the things we get more, and support them whenever we can.
avilla
onyeah @paramita your take in the tons of plugins in the market is true.
i love classic pianos, so is also true that could be useful for me. thanks for the feedback.
peaceee
noxiouzz
onThousands of great modern fm synths out there, free and paid, vsts and hardware, and yet people still crave for Yamaha DX7 released in 1989, and companies still release sample packs and emulations of DX7. Because it’s THAT sound.
Same here. There are better generic key alternatives, but there are no better Roland MKS20 key alternatives. Gospel Musicions still sell a multi-gigabyte instrument sampled off of MKS20, because it sounds great, and direct emulation of the original unit is always better than samples.
xyz
onfor anyone who missed out on excite audio vision 4x lite
now free at plugin boutique with new code: Master4XL
Georg
onThank you, much appreciated!
Norbert
onFirst try had some bad crackles and then silence. A reset of the ASIO driver solved it all. I love this thing!
Adilbek Temirkhanov
onLoads up fine, but crashes Reaper after few minutes :(
imoyes
onVersion 0.4 seems to be working fine on my M1 Mac in Logic. Love the sound, and appreciate GiulioZ for his tremendous work bringing this to us!
obo
onno crashes in Ableton 12 on Mac (yet). This is a keeper for sure – I’m sure they’ll get the bugs worked out. Sounds amazing
shane
onseems the windows vst is not available now.. clicking the download gets a 404
Alberto Balsam
onCool that this is reverse engineered rather than just samples, but this isn’t really ready for any sort of public release yet. Will be watching for later releases!
Joop
onThe same here, 404 scfreen
shane
onit is updated for windows and so far no crash and sounds fine.
OP
onYeah, I can confirm this. The new version is way better in terms of performance. There are some issues with GUI, but not critical. If the plugin’s GUI is open, it drastically increases the RAM usage. When it is closed, memory is freed. (Win10, FL Studio) I think these problems are related to the JUCE framework. Also, in FL Studio you need to turn on “Use fixed size buffers” option to avoid sound crackles.
Thanks to the developer!
Joop
onDownloaded the new version. Works perfectly with Cantabile, reasonable CPU load!
MJ
onAnyone who succesfully got the standalone version to run on Win11? I get an Access Violation error in the Event Log and no UI or anything when launching the application.
Frits van Zanten
onIn Ableton vou can now change the settings in the device panel (click the triangle to make them appear)), so you can bypass the GUI, if that might give you trouble.