Roland R-8

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).

Joseph H.

September 22, 2008 @ 1:38 am

Super cool drum machine for the era. I think I paid around $800.00 for it new up at some North Hollywood music shop that was big into electronic gear at the time. One draw back was that you could only use one expansion card at a time. The sound quality is very good for the time and it has some of the best 808 and 909 samples even to this day.

Krinor

September 19, 2008 @ 2:36 pm

According to some sources this drum machine was used by Dead Can Dance back in the 80's.

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