Roland Space Echos RE-101/RE-201 and Chorus Echo RE-301 "What price clear music" full page colour advertisement from page 47 in the May 1978 issue of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine.
Man, is it just me, or does that black/olive green combo with pops of red look great. Wow, I love that.
Anyways, in my recent blog post on Roland's 1984 advertisement for their SDE-series of digital delay rack effects, one of the major talking points about the design of the ad was that of readability. More specifically, Roland's design decision to consciously or unconciously put form before function and make the ad-copy fit within the design of the ad, even thought this would affect readability. In other words, the ad-copy became one big block of text. I also pointed out that Roland had done this with other ads as well, such as the one for their 1986 Alpha-Juno ad.
And, to be clear, I liked both of those ads. :)
"Get to the point, Retro!"
Well, my point is that Roland was doing this waaaay before those two ads were created - and you can see it in this 1978 Roland Space Echo advertisement as well. Even more interesting is the size of the logo in the various ads. In those later ads, the logo is almost as small as the ad text. Still, it's interesting that if I asked you to look for the logo, your eyes would only take a few seconds to find it. Placement is everything.
Although Roland really pushed the 101, 201 and 301 in ads and magazines (they were always the photos), the ad actually mentions that there were six models available. Six? What the....?!?!? Let's see...
According to the RE-201 Wikipedia page, The RE-100 was the earliest in the series appearing around 1973 along with the RE-200, the main difference being that the 200 also included a spring reverb. Both were later replaced by the 101 and 201, and according to Sound on Sound's excellent November 2004 article on the history of Roland, these launched in 1974.
That SOS article also dates the RE-301 as launching in 1977 and Part 2 of the article that ran a month later dates the RE-150 as coming out in 1979.
The Wikipedia page also references a later RE-501/SRE-555 rack, and SOS dates it's launch in 1980.
So, in summary:
RE-100: 1973
RE-200: 1973
RE-101: 1974
RE-201: 1974
RE-301: 1977
RE-150: 1979
RE-501: 1980
But wait... this ad came out in May 1978. And it mentions six models. But by 1978 only five models were released. Hmmm... So, either Roland jumped the gun on promoting the unreleased RE-150, Sound on Sound has some dates wrong, or... maybe I researched/typed something wrong. But, I can't find out where I may have gone wrong.
Another possibility is that Roland is including the DC-50 digital chorus that came out in 1976. It had a similar look to the RE-series - big knobs, black/green colour, etc... Later DC-models like the DC-10 (1977) and DC20/30 (1978) were much smaller units with little design similarities with the RE-series.
Huh.
One last thing... because I think its neat...A really great comparison between the RE-101 and RE-201 can be found in a 1975 "Deepen the depth of your music" Roland Space Echo brochure I posted back in late 2012. One of the neat-o things about this early Space Echo brochure is that nowhere in the actual text of the brochure are either unit actually referred to as "Space Echos". Yeah, the name is on the actual pieces of equipment, but it's like Roland hadn't realized what an awesome name "Space Echo" was back in 1975.
As you can see by this ad though, buy 1978 Roland had figured it out. And the "Space Echo" name had become a more general term, even for the "Chorus Echo".
"Space Echo". Good name for a band. :)
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