Roland R-8 (click to enlarge)

One of the very best drum machines ever. It has excellent sounds which can be expanded by adding additional sound cards (808 and 909 cards). Great rock, electronic, ethnic and industrial style drumkits! Most of the sounds are editable - tune, decay, attack, nuance, output, etc...

But its coolest tricks are the Feel Patches which give your program a human-like groove! The sounds are ROM based samples, the R-8 has 32 note polyphony, 68 instruments, 100 patterns and 10 songs! The R-8 later became the R-8mkII with more memory and sounds. It is used by Orbital, Underworld, Jimmy Edgar, Autechre, 808 State, Dave Holmes, Fluke, Human League and The Shamen.

Roland R-8mkII

A single-space rack-mount version - the R-8M - was also available. It had no sequencer but it did have the R-8 sounds and the ability to read R-8 expansion sound cards. There were also 8 individual outputs, 12 voices polyphony and 4-part multitimbral MIDI. Later, an mkII model was released with upgraded features and memory (pictured above).

39 VISITOR COMMENTS

sam

May 21, 2012 @ 4:10 am

@ryko
"My old synths are filling my garage up; too noisy and too unreliable, unlike the software versions I now use"

so how about instead of hording them you sell them off to people that will actually make music with them?

fortunato

May 18, 2012 @ 2:27 pm

i have a cheap r8m for sale. anyone interested?

Owen

April 29, 2012 @ 5:39 am

Hi,

Im looking for sound cards for the r-8, if anyone has any for sale please let me know.

cheers

Rkyo

April 18, 2012 @ 6:17 am

I bought an R8 when we failed to audition a drummer who was good enough. Then I bought an R8 Mk2, which I still use every day. It's the only bit of vintage kit I still use. (Apart from the effects board in my Akai S3000SL, which I use for real tine effects on the R8 - I haven't used it as a sampler or synth for ages though. Ha.) My old synths are filling my garage up; too noisy and too unreliable, unlike the software versions I now use. The best bit of the R8 is the ability to play melodies in 'Multi' mode assigning a sound to all 12 pads tuned in semitones.

Vinyl

April 7, 2012 @ 4:08 am

R8M 5 cards including Ethnic percussion, manuals too.

offers?

Vinyl

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