Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer

I first saw the 707 when I worked at ERAS recording in New York. I was helping build new room in this commercial recording studio, and one of the first people trying the new room brought along one of these. It was so much smaller than the LINNDrum that I was used to seeing in there, but it sounded big. But what doesn't on a huge studio speaker?

People were going to samplers, and drum machines sort of fell out of fashion. You could just sample your drum sounds and there you had it. So I got this on the tail end of it's run, on sale. Say, 1985?

Using the 707 was easy and fun. It had an interface similar to the 909, 808 and 606. I had a 606, so it worked pretty much the same way. Everything was graphically displayed on the front, including a grid representation of the entire pattern you were playing or working on. Look at the tiny mixer, one fader for every drum, right on the front. In a brilliant bit of overkill there were individual outs for each sound!

The short fall was a lack of variety in the samples. They were 16 bit samples, yes, but you got 2 bass drums, and pretty much one of everything else. The sounds got boring. The samples were not tunable either.

I sold it through a newspaper listing. A young kid, wannabe Vanilla Ice, came in and hit the bass drum key once. The look of excitement on his face practically brought tears to my eyes so I didn't mind that it sold for $99. It was going to a good home

Anyway, I didn't need it. I'd sampled all the drums into my Yamaha TX16W.