Hot and in the pocket?I owned the 770 around 2002 and it's been since discontinued. Called "the most advanced compact rhythm machine ever" when it came out, this drum box was packed with features, patterns and samples. Goodness, it held 10,000 patterns! You could apply effects, the buttons had extreme sensitivity, you could trigger patterns on the fly right off the front panel, it had tons of samples — 52 kick drums alone! The first sample based drum machine I owned, the Roland 707 had 2, and a dozen or so samples in total!
Ok, ok, I'm bridging decades with the two machines, but am I the only gear geek who thinks Boss/Roland was referencing its drum machine heritage by naming the 770 so similarly to the vintage 707? I don't think so. When they introduced the 770, they were most definitely making a point that the new unit was a milestone model, like the 707 was.
Back when it was introduced in the 80s the 707 was the first affordable sample based machine with professional features like individual outs, memory cards and high quality sample resolution (12 bit, high for then, in any case). It had groove-box style, front panel, bar/measure based visual LED programming. It even had a hands-on front panel mixer with a dedicated slider per drum sound! It was easy to get in there and get musical. Who knew how limited it was back in the 80s?
Years later, the 770 obviously blows the old piece away in terms of what it could do, if you could only figure out how: pattern memory, samples, dynamics, effects, you name it. The problem was I couldn't figure out how without sticking my head constantly in the manual. What happened with the 770 can be explained using everyday math. Observe the following formula:
1000 x the capability
-------------------------- = Serious interruption of your flow.
a tiny front panel
A lot of user friendliness and musicality was lost along the long path that led from the 707 to the 770, and drum machines have become charming retro devices because of this trend in overly complex user interfaces. Computer based instruments make life at least somewhat easier with their infinite recall and generally more complete visual representations of parameters. I doubt most owners of the 770 learn how to use even to 10% of what it was capable of.
A bit of added drama surfaced online around this machine too. Complaints bubbled up about it getting extremely hot, possibly dangerously so, and possibly to the point of damaging the unit, burning the D.J. or even starting a fire. Probably unfounded, but enough to put a scare in me. And for the cost, close to $400, as I recall, it soon seemed like overkill. I sampled my favorite patterns and use those sounds in Ableton Live to this day.
But hey:
- if you want an over-the-top traditional style drum machine
- if you're willing to climb a steep learning curve
- if you have an ebay account
My 770 most definitely gets too hot. The bottom of the case has a burn mark on it, as if you took a match to it. It worked, well - until recently that is (I suspect some solder joints may have melted) This drum machine has some serious heat sink deficiencies.
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ReplyDeleteThis was my first piece of gear. I still use it to this day since I got it in 2002, and I feel like I finally have a handle on it - I'm using all 64 of the custom drum kits (it took me almost a decade to make them of course!), all with custom effect settings on each hit (my favorite is the Individual Out setting so I can actually modify some of the sounds with outboard mixing), I use it to sequence patterns in my SP-303 and MC-09 (i find the dr-770 step sequencer to be miles ahead of either of those machines), and all I need to learn now is how to send the proper SysEx messages to it from ableton that allow me to modify the effects paramaters live :) An immensely powerful machine!!
ReplyDeleteHey John. Glad to know there are guys out there who are taking advantage of the depth of this box. One word to you (well 4): Back up your data. I'd hate to loose ten years of programming. I don't know how much you've used Ableton with midi, but it's pretty easy to set up control surfaces to move Ableton's faders and parameters -- heading INTO the computer software. You just activate the midi button click on a fader, say, and then adjust something on the outboard gear and the fader "learns" the incoming midi message. I would imagine you could do it the other way too, using a blank track and it's faders or sends to send those messages out to the 770, if your routing is set up right. Never tried it though, but when I get home I will with some outboard midi gear that sends midi messages. There's got to be a way. There are also add ons like Control Aid, which take midi messages and convert them to multiple messages or rout them in specific ways. Also messed with that going IN only. Worth looking at. I know that a version Steinberg Cubase VST that I used to use a few years ago allowed you to build virtual mixers and devices and you could assign any sys ex or CC parameter to the virtual faders, knobs and buttons. Usually common parameters like reverb depth or amount are set to standard CC numbers on midi drum machines and synths so it may be easier that it seems...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, good luck with that.