micahcowan
Active member
I am not familiar with the Dale Mathis User Programs. I tried to get them some time ago, but they are not for sale. They only come with a purchased accordion from Kraft Music (previously available from Crown Music in Arizona). Tom has the best information on the Dale Mathis Programs.
I purchased the Richard Noel User Programs. They are $150 for 31 Program Banks of 14 User programs in each Bank. That's 434 User Programs. As Tom said there are a very wide variety of sounds, like 2001 Space Odyssey, Rocky 1, Star Wars, etc. However, Richard also has many more traditional Accordion sounds, Organ, and Orchestral sounds. I have never spoken to Richard, but I had several questions for him. He answered every one in detail. All correspondence was via E-mail,
John
The FR-1x only has memory slots for a total of 8 "user programs". Note also that a "user program" has no sounds in it, it is a saved snapshot of user settings, only. A library of hundreds of these does no one much good, as no matter how many someone else may have, you will generally want to create your own according to your needs and preferences. Someone selling hundreds of "user programs" is completely uninteresting to me (but makes for excellent, if quite misleading, marketing). You'll get differences in reverb, in bellows curve (or disabling the need for bellows completely), things like that, but nothing that modifies the core sounds themselves.
The sound samples are stored in two available slots for user sample library files. Two files. These are accessed by up to four "user sets". A "user set" is a mapping of some of those samples in one of the two files, to the available registers. Thus, when it comes to accordion sounds, you can have at the very most*, four total unique, non-factory instruments loaded on the instrument at a time. And that's only if all four happen to be representable in the two samples files you've loaded (but you can presumably edit them using Roland's software, to contain the sounds you need for two of the sets you want). Please bear all of this in mind as you consider spending $150 on any expansion library. Before doing that, I suggest trying the Dallape sound expansion that Roland makes available for free.
* You get more sounds if you use their sound programmer to "mix and match" different accordion sounds into a given sample library and user set, I suppose, but since one user set = one mapping of the registers, from an accordion perspective I find it most useful to think of one user set = one complete, virtual accordion. If you use one of the orchestral expansion libraries (Roland provides one for free, and it's necessary if you want to play, say, an Electric Piano sound), then obviously you are loading many more "instruments" in a user set than one... but it's still "one accordion's worth" to me, since it still amounts to a register-mapping.
All this information is available in the FR-1x manual, available for free from Roland's website. See sections 11 and 12 for user programs, user sets, and sound files.