Boss DR 770 Redux

10/16/2010 Update: My laptop is on the fritz and I'm unable to do music on it. So I've been just playing through an amp and practicing. I needed a beat, so I traded in my Behringer midi controller for another Boss DR-770, yes the same one I'd already written about.

I headed down to Rogue Music on 30th Street in Manhattan. At first I was looking at a Zoom 323, which has an interesting setup, 3 tracks of music, bass lines included. But either it wasn't working right or I was too dumb to pick it up. So I tried the 770 and found that it was pretty cool. I'm liking it this time around and it's amazing how much I actually remember about how to run the thing. Not as complex as I remember.

Only problem: after the first hour it began to smell like smoke. Not like it was burning up, but like a pipe. Clearly the previous owner was a smoker.

I'm hoping that the smell fades. I'm considering putting it in a sealed box with some activated charcoal. Any other ideas?

I'm going to program a bunch of songs into there so that I can rehearse my keyboard playing.

Kind of fun to get away from the computer.

Dr. Rhythm DR-770

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

Log in and get one of these for about $159. But make sure it comes with a manual.

Zoom RhythmTrak RT-123

. . . yet another drum machine, but it's see-through!

Don't get me wrong, even though this was a bottom-of-the-line box it did have 3 tracks to sequence. You could fire off patterns, even multiple patterns, at the same time, on the fly, d.j. style – and it had bass sounds!

And yes, it was a produced in very beautiful see-through blue plastic. I loved it as an object.

Specs:
• Drum kits: 80.
• Bass programs: 25.
• Rhythm patterns: 297 preset, 99 user.
• Songs: 99.
• Maximum notes: 10,000.
• Maximum polyphony: 30 voices.
• Resolution: 96 PPQN.
• Tempo range: 40-250bpm.
• Quantise values: quarter, eighth, eighth triplet, sixteenth, sixteenth triplet, thirty-second, thirty-second triplet notes, and off.
• Outputs: quarter-inch jack (L/Mono, R); headphones.
• Inputs: MIDI In; quarter-inch mono line in; footswitch.
• Power: 9V AC.

After playing with it for a while I ended up triggering sounds on this from my sequencer. When it comes down to it, unless you are not computer savvy, who needs a drum machine? Sequencers are more powerful and easier to edit.

Goods: It was pretty translucent blue plastic toy. The pads lit up. Ooh! It was fun and really small.

Bads: No tuning on the sounds. It had a high end bite that I found low-rez sounding. Only stereo audio outs, and no midi out, so forget about exporting your pattern data.

I think it cost about $125. I got like $90 or so for it after a few months. You can pick one up on ebay now for about $50, I'd guess.

Roland SPD-6

Back in 1985 or so, Gary Bettum and I (you out there somewhere Gary?) worked together at a midtown recording studio called ERAS. We were helping to build a little room, and when it was done, the first piece of gear we put in was a set of Simmons synth drums. Very 80s.

The Simmons bass drum was a huge hexagonal pad, about as tall as an actual bass drum. We got to thinking about how there was no reason for the size. It could just as well be a tiny area big enough for only the beater ball to strike. Soon we fantasized about a suitcase sized drum trigger unit with some rubber pads that could fire off drum sounds like the Simmons, but be really portable.

Well, of course we were right, that would be cool, and soon enough, may companies started to make our dream come true. The Linn drum was out, and then you had the Akai MPC triggering samples and redefining music production. These days I own the very capable Triggerfinger, and any number of tiny controllers are on the market. But for a while, it was just the Octapad, and eventually this, it's baby brother, the SPD-6. I got one, mainly because it was so cheap, a few hundred bucks.

6 pads and internal samples. Tough enough to play with sticks, and sensitive enough to play with your fingers (it had a sensitivity switch). It was cool. Especially if you really knew how to play the drums. I finally had my suitcase-sized drum kit, ready to throw into a bag and take anywhere.

It had some limitations, however. First of all there was no midi in. So you couldn't trigger its sounds from midi data. You could trigger your sampler from it, and program midi tracks. But you couldn't use use it as a midi playback unit. The sound set was small, only 113 samples.

If only they had bundled more of a variety of sounds and a drum machine in there. As it was it was just a bit too limited to really compete. It was soon discontinued.

Maybe a full kit of V-drums can be played with some body-feel, but listening back, I couldn't tell the difference between drum parts I programed on this unit and the ones created on a piano-style midi keyboard.

On to ebay it went, and in turn I purchased a drum machine with tons more sounds and over the top programing possibilities and full midi capability: the Boss DR-770.

Roland Drumatix TR-606

A crystal ball would have been nice back in the mid 1980s. That's when I hocked my TR-606. This analog drum machine sells for $500 today. I should have just put it in the closet for a while. Who knew?

Most people using these today are too young to remember the time when sample playback drum machines became available. Suddenly the 606 sounded totally cheesy. Even embarrassing. However, listening to my old recordings that include it, I do appreciate the thwacky, solid punch of the analog bass and snare. The hats rock too.

But alas, I've got all the sounds on my mac now, and you can get software versions of this that do more than the original.

Yes, this was the cool at the time, and it's cool again, but honestly, I don't miss it.

I do love telling people that I sold mine for $75!

Akai XE8 Percussion Module

The Akai XE8 fit the bill for the early 90s Smokotalky concept of a neat, efficient rack mounted studio. Here was a unit with a bunch of Akai sounds built in to a 1 space rack. Mind you this was before the mega hardware and software romplers, and before the Alesis D4-5 rack mount units and others like them.

The good: The sounds were all really editable. Tunable. Good quality 16 bit sounds. Long tails.

The bad: It only had about 12 sounds or something like that! Tiny dials that had dual functions equals confusion and errors. All numerical display (a number rather than "bass dr" or even "HH". Expansion card slot on the back (hard to reach). Expensive, hard to locate cards. No memory locations.

I got rid of this in favor of the Alesis SR-16, a drum machine that didn't fit in a rack, but had lots more sounds to trigger, plus the hands-on immediacy of a drum machine if you just wanted to just fool around, practice licks or dream up stuff without having to boot up the whole studio.

Here's a good post giving a lot of specifics on this unit.

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.