I can take “Buy a synthesizer at the Tokyo Roland Store” off my bucket list!

While in Tokyo, I had to make at a stop that I’ve always wanted to visit: Roland Store Tokyo, the flagship store of the venerable Roland, maker of all sorts of electronic music instruments.

The store is located in Harajuku, right in the middle of where Tokyo’s various youth subcultures hang out, and where tourists (admittedly including myself) come to check out all the quirky shops, especially those devoted to kawaii.

If you’re an electronic musician and in Tokyo, this store is a must-visit…

It was the last hours of our last day in Tokyo, so we were short on time. That meant that I had to stick to the main floor (the synthesizer floor), and that’s why my photos are of.

The entryway featured the hot new boutique synths of the moment:

• The Jupiter-08, a “boutqiue-sized” digital recreation of the 1981 classic, the Jupiter 8
• The n/vision, a “boutique-sized” wavetable synth

Both were so new that they weren’t going on sale for a couple of days. The display models were there to give prospective buyers a chance to try them out, and they sound great!

A tour of the first floor

This was a last-minute stop, and we were pressed for time, so I stayed on the main floor with the intent of maybe buying one of the “Aira” series of compact synths.

Here’s the back wall of the first floor:

A view from the back wall:

And here are the display Aira units:

There was a guy ahead of me who was trying to choose between the S-1 (which I wanted) and the J-6 (nice, but it’s more of a chord machine with less sound tweakability, and I know how to play chords).

He went with the J-6, and when it became my turn to talk to the staff, it turned out that there was one S-1 left on their stock shelves that day. I took it as a sign from the synth gods that I should buy it then and there.

At the current exchange rate, I got it for $100 cheaper than I would’ve had I bought it in the U.S., and I bought it at the mothership!

Unboxing pics

As a foreigner, I was able to buy the S-1 tax-free, but that meant that I couldn’t unbox it until I left the country. So I unboxed it and tried it out on the flight to Manila.

Following internet tradition, here are my unboxing pics…