Roland GO:KEYS 3 Reviewed
Since losing hours poking away at a Casio MT-68 as a child, I’ve always had a soft spot for synthesizers with a bundle of sound options and a sprinkling of effects. Eager to instil this same musical wonder into my kids I have, on and off for many, many years now, glanced off a parade of rather uninspiring kids musical keyboards.
They’re cheap, I’ll grant them that, but musical keyboards aimed at kids appear to have reached deep into either the realms of the very, very boring or outright cheesy. The best you can expect is a hammy collection of backing tunes with some passable but rather unpleasant instruments to jam along with them. To be sure, the kids love whatever makes a noise so in some small part I’m being a miserable pedant- but good sounds matter, and are so much more rewarding to play.
As expected, the GO:KEYS 3 was a hit!
It was during one of my countless searches for something exciting that I came across Roland’s GO:KEYS 3. I’ve been a Roland user before- buying the Fantom X8 in my misspent twenties, and diving into its deep, complex menus but mostly enjoying the piano. Then I grabbed the Juno D because the X8 was a monster to lug anywhere, and I wanted to play keyboard in practice rooms with my friends. That didn’t quite pan out, my friends wanted me to play bass… sigh. Suffice to say I never really used either of these enough to justify owning them, and eventually sold them to pick up a simpler piano that would keep my daughter focussed on practise. This was all many, many years ago and apparently a lot has changed since then. Well, apparently everything but Roland’s LCD screen sizes. What’s the deal with that?
When the urge to buy a piano bit me again more recently (read: maybe five years ago now), I picked up – I don’t even remember what – a basic 88-key weighted Casio. It was boring, but it worked. More recently again I had something of a mid-life crisis and splurged on a refurbished Yamaha MODX8. Sheesh I got that thing at a good price, and it’s an amazing piano, but my kids keep deleting my favourites. Argh! I had given the boring Casio away so I needed something to keep them distracted, and interested.
Anyway the GO:KEYS 3 tickled something- it married an evolution of the patches I’d come to know and love with something smaller, simpler and easier to pick up and play, but nonetheless satisfying. I managed to convince Roland to loan me one so I could give it a try.
And oh wow am I glad I did.
To put it simply, the GO:KEYS 3 is the most fun I’ve had with a keyboard since those hours I lost with the Casio MT-68 over three decades ago. There is just something so utterly wonderful about a piano that looks like a mere toy producing exquisite sounds across a dizzying variety of instruments. And that’s only the very surface of what it can do.
Menu Spelunking
The GO:KEYS 3 is- at least to someone who’s willing to menu dive and maybe has at least a passing knowledge of what some of the things mean- a very deep and complex instrument capable of pulling off a whole bunch of neat tricks that those cheap-and-nasty kids pianos can’t so much as dream of.
For starters there is splits and layering. While I will gloss over splits – since 61 keys doesn’t really afford much range – layering two instruments together is a fantastic and accessible way to experiment with sound. Synth pad and flute for a screaming lead sound? Yes please.
But beyond that Roland’s GO:KEYS 3 hides a deceptively powerful filter system that, with some determined menu spelunking, lets you tweak Tape Echo into a massive reverb, or crank the arpeggiator so far that it produces a reasonable facsimile of the Commodore 64’s signature arpeggiated hurgly gurgly chord sound.
Speaking of arpeggios you’ll find a few juicy options here, too. In addition to octave range and timing settings you’ll find note on duration – dial this right down for a staccato effect – and shuffle – play with this to break up the regular note timing for a more interesting cadence. Best of all, you can hold down an arpeggiated chord (easier if you have a sustain pedal connected) and play with the parameters to see how they change the sound as it’s playing. By far my favourite thing to tweak is the note duration, blending from a staccato gurgle of notes into almost a continuous chord.
To say the GO:KEYS 3 has a plethora of sounds might be underselling it somewhat. It’s jam packed with everything from pianos to drum kits, synths to sound effects and everything in between. Many of these are a little lifeless – focussed on covering all the bases of, for example, saxophone types rather than putting forward one well-rounded option. That’s not to say there’s nothing good here, though, and even a basic Saxaphone can be punched up with liberal application of filters or by layering them with a second sound.
What About The Kids?
I wanted the GO:KEYS 3 to instill a similar fascination to that I had with the Casio MT-68 in my kids. They’re a little younger than I was, but are nonetheless both very interested in music and enjoy playing it.
I met some success. My middle child – five years old – especially likes recording their noodling and playing it back. It wasn’t until I backed up the GO:KEYS 3 onto a USB drive that I realised all these saved tracks are available as standard MIDI files that we could keep. Suffice to say, if you do any casual tinkering on the GO:KEYS it’s a good idea to hit record just in case you play something you might want to snip out later.
The youngest – two and change – alternates between mashing the keys and gently trying to tease out a tune. They are particularly musical so I spent some time unsuccessfully trying to teach them the melody for Twinkle-twinkle-little-star. At two and a half I’m probably expecting too much.
It’s definitely a little early yet for an instrument of this caliber; somehow the worst kind of kids keyboard has made its way back into our household, throwing into stark contrast just how much better GO:KEYS 3 sounds. It’s a tiny red thing with impossibly awful keys and those hammy backing tunes I was talking about.
But it’s not just sound that matters, the keys on GO:KEYS 3 are full sized, and quite heavily weighted. This can be beneficial for developing piano-adjacent skills, though it does not feel quite like a piano. If I’m honest with myself I don’t like how it feels, but I very quickly forget about it when I get lost in playing. The kids? It’s good for them to get used to a firm keybed and they don’t know what they’re missing. Most beginners wouldn’t either, though if you (or your child) are actively taking piano lessons it may not be the ideal instrument- packed full of distraction as it is. The GO:KEYS 3 is fun, adventurous, explorative, deep, complex and addictive.
The Bad?
The tiny LCD screen feels like a very narrow window into the complicated and diverse world of GO:KEYS 3’s sounds. The menu is relatively well designed, buttons align with their corresponding on-screen function, it’s uncomplicated and relatively intuitive – but it feels very, very constrained.
The practical limitations of not having a larger, touch-screen display fall mostly around discovery. Finding a particular sound, perhaps one you’ve come across before and loosely remember the name or category of, is a ponderous task. You’ll normally have to switch into “List” mode where you’ll see at most four sounds, and use the arrow keys to switch between categories that aren’t represented by the five category shortcut buttons. You can optionally hit “Catg” which gives you a list of categories to scan through.
Those five category shortcut buttons can be long-pressed to assign a favourite, but there are a lot of really great sounds to be found and five just isn’t enough. Remember those kids keyboards with the huge sound lookup table printed on them, and a number pad to dial ‘em in? I kinda miss that here.
Thankfully there’s a rotary knob for changing parameters, but there’s only one so you can’t get too fancy with mixing things like the aforementioned arpeggio note-on duration and cutoff/resonance sweeps. It’s fine, this isn’t a synthesizer even if it lets you explore some synth adjacent tricks.
What bothers me more is that the rotary encoder lacks a push button. Changing parameters involves remembering to switch between spinning the encoder and pressing the “Enter” button below. I find this surprisingly counterintuitive and more often than not I will spin the wheel expecting the selected parameter to change, and be surprised when it scrolls the list. That’s probably a me problem, but a pressable wheel could be a huge UX improvement. To Roland’s credit they’ve got encoders nailed and you can fling your way through menus without it ever feeling like it’s missing a step.
Another bugbear, there is – as far as I know – no way to route music played – to – the GO:KEYS 3 around the Total FX filter. This means if you’ve got a filter to get your sound right, it’ll mess up the music you want to jam along to. This can be quite fun, in its own right, but means you’re usually better just playing music from your phone to separate speakers rather than using the GO:KEYS Bluetooth functionality.
As far as I can tell the weight of the keys is uniform and it’s beyond my ability to do trills on even the highest note. They are firm to press, which makes the whole board learn toward expressive playing. It’s at least a nod toward the feel of playing a piano even if it’s lacking some of the finer details. If you’re looking for something that feels a bit more like a light touch synth then this is not it.
The Good
This key weight – despite not feeling ideal – results in keys that don’t clack or rattle, a keybed you can really hammer on while wearing headphones and not disturb anyone in the room with you.
The built-in speakers are too good for headphones, though, and seem to handle roughly everything at full volume with no distortion I can detect. Bass response is also deliciously satisfying considering there are only two large speakers and no dedicated woofers or tweeters.
It was easy to hook up my Yamaha sustain pedal, though it did require a quick dive into the menu to find the pedal invert function. A pedal makes all the difference with piano playing, and is very much something you’ll want to add. For kids, though, it’s unnecessary. They’ll be too busy with the pitch bend wheel. Oh, did I mention it has a pitch bend wheel? Many beginner pianos don’t- mostly because they don’t have sounds befitting pitch bend or modulation. The GO:KEYS 3 goes a step further and allows you to assign to adjust the pitch bend range or change its behaviour to something very satisfying like pitch-up, modulation down. This is great for playing electric piano/synth mixes and adds some much needed extra opportunity for expression. If you’re enjoying a little relaxing tickle of the ivories, your kids will also definitely rock up and wiggle this constantly. Defeat their valiant efforts by diving into the Settings and changing “Rx Pitch Bend” to off.
My most used filter by a country mile 🤣
Did I mention how much I love the Tape Echo? Not only is the echo a delicious way to enjoy an electric piano, but the Wow/Flutter adds a little pitch variation and brings just a taste of the analogue imperfections of – for example – The Mellotron. Combine this with some envelope tweaking and it’s remarkable how much variation you can get from just a single sound.
Split/Dual mode takes this up a notch, but it’s also a great way to quickly access two sounds since the F1 and F2 keys (aligned below the LCD) become shortcuts to the two split sounds in single sound play. As you would expect since GO:KEYS 3 has no trouble playing two sounds at once you’ll also be able to switch while another is still sounding.
In Conclusion
It’s not perfect, but it’s not far from perfection either. The GO:KEYS 3 is a joy to play, a joy to tinker with and – despite its high price compared to basic kids pianos – packs a heck of a lot of bang for your buck. I can’t argue with it being available in a glorious, vibrant turquoise either- that’s a bold choice.
While I didn’t manage to explore the full complement of features – every time I picked the thing up to test it, I’d lose hours just playing the electric piano sounds – I found a very comprehensive set of sounds and filters, and came up with combos I saved and played again and again. While my Yamaha MODX8 occasionally beacons me, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. My younger self would have been thrilled to swap the Casio MT-68 for one of these, though I would perhaps have wanted some envelope sliders for more accessible sound tuning.
In short the GO:KEYS 3 was everything I’d hoped it would be and more, now all I need is a stand… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJwXPFIxdSw
Oh and I still have the GO:KEYS 3… I liked it so much I bought it. It’s always in arms reach, but we don’t have enough room to leave it set up.