Roland FP-30 + iPad

Sun, Nov 3, 2024

How to connect an iPad Air 2 to a Roland FP-30 digital piano.

Problem

A encountered a couple of issues which caused the process to be less smooth than I’d hoped:

• The Roland FP-30 instruction manual says to turn bluetooth on you press the FUNCTION key, and while holding it press “A0” key (first key on the left). However, on my keyboard at least, there is no indication to say that bluetooth is now on (I expected FUNCTION light to start flashing blue).
• on the iPad, by default FP-30 doesn’t show up in the list of available bluetooth devices (even though it does show up when scanning from other devices). This, combined with the previous issue, led me to believe that FP-30 bluetooth wasn’t actually turned on! 🤔

Solution

1. Install the Roland Piano App app from the Apple App Store
2. Open the app and step through the process of looking for a digital piano via bluetooth. At this point the FP-30 will be detected and added to the iPad’s list of connected bluetooth devices. When adding the digital piano, you may see an error like ‘MIDI device connection error’ appear in the Roland Piano App, however this doesn’t seem to matter - MIDI will still work!
3. Open another app that uses MIDI (e.g. Sunday Keys) and you should be able to use the FP-30 as a MIDI input