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"The synth engine was designed by Akira Matsui, a former Roland engineer, who joined Roland in 1977, and was involved with the development of a variety of synths, including the SYSTEM-700 and SYSTEM-100, the early GR-series guitar synths and the JX-3P.

After retiring from Roland in 2013, Matsui immersed himself in his hobby of making electronic devices in his home studio. A Roland staff member who happened to see the homemade synth was instantly intrigued and approached Matsui to learn more about it. This is where the 8-Bit CPU Synth was born, which is now featured in the A-01.

“One day I wondered what it would be like to make a synth with an 8-bit CPU,” explains Matsui, below. “The idea was to see how far I could go with the limited resources of an 8-bit CPU and 8 KB of memory.”

“I think this was in early 2014,” he continues. “The first thing I programmed was the oscillator, and somewhat surprisingly, it ended up being something that you could play decent scales on without using a lot of resources. I then programmed all of the analog synth elements?the filter, followed by amp, and then LFO?and I was able to pack all of them in quite nicely. In the remaining space, I programmed a step sequencer, and the finished result was the 8-Bit CPU Synth.”

“I spent a lot of time tuning the program. There’s no point in having a synth with lousy sound,” adds Matsui. “But if you begin making elaborate tunings in your effort to improve the sound, you will quickly run out of your 8 KB resource limit. So you do your tuning, but also make sure that the program fits into 8 KB. I think this is what makes the 8-Bit CPU Synth’s sound so unique and distinct from modern synthesizers or software sound engines.”"