RolandTalk.com

It may seem strange for a Japanese company to have a Western name, but Roland was founded with export in mind. Ikutaro Kakehashi heard that the name of his previous company, Ace Electronic Industries Inc., was often mangled in pronunciation, sometimes unpleasantly; so he looked for a good-sounding name which would be pronounced roughly the same in all of his major export markets. He found the name Roland in a telephone directory, browsing for an American-sounding name amongst the “R”s because no other electronic instrument manufacturer’s name started with this letter.

Ironically, the name is difficult to pronounce correctly in Kakehashi’s native Japanese, which does not distinguish the ‘L’ and ‘R’ sounds as in English.

Roland was not, as is often claimed, named after the French epic poem La Chanson de Roland.