The 707 sounds good until you play it side by side with analog synths, which really exposes the faults of the VA tech. Some of the presets are pretty good, but the second you have to go under the hood to adjust some parameters, it gets extremely tedious. That said, the overall workflow is good if you can just resign yourself to A) surfing presets or B) menu diving hell.
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This is why I got the 101. Got a taste for the sound library w/ the Ax Edge keytar. Great preset and effects box.
I don’t agree with this, tbh… sound wise it stands up well against all my analog synths, especially when you give it some external processing (Analog Heat works wonders for the 707, for example).
Yes, I agree, and I can’t resign to either of these and that is what always makes me put it away.
But then, I get drawn back in by its best trick of being a Roland sound library… and so the cycle continues.
I’ve got to say, a better editor than Zenology/Roland Cloud, or a better version, could make all the difference.
Zenology just sucks out all the life/enthusiasm/fun. For a company the size of Roland, it’s baffling.
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The Fantom hardware is more powerful than the MC hardware. The Fantom-0 has two Roland BMC chips (four in the “big” Fantom), the MCs only one. I therefore think that for this reason there will be no modeling extensions for the MCs in the future.
I own a Fantom-0 and a MC-101, which I use separately from each other. The Fantom allows TR recording, but in a rather stripped down form without probability and such things. I’m very happy that the Fantom allows TR recording. But for detailed beat programming, the MCs are significantly more suitable.
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The models on the Roland might consume more polyphony per BMC, they don’t require 2 BMC chips to run. So these models could very much run on the MC with a more limited polyphony, it doesn’t mean they can’t run. Same principle as ACB, the ACB boutiques and the System 1 can run up to 4 notes, while the system 8 can(could) run all the ACB models up to 8 notes. But one chip is enough to run the engine itself.
Of course the MC have a few differences with the Fantom-0, but I’m very much talking about specs here. 1 minutes for loops and 6 minutes or so of sampling time max for the MC was just not enough in 2020 or whenever these devices were released, and the MC707 isn’t everything but cheap yet has the same RAM limitations as the MC101. A bit strange for a device that claims to focus on “audioloops” and also inferior to the last MC of the 2000’s decade, the MC808 that could go up to 512 MB of RAM IIRC.
All these design choices from Roland are just baffling.
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I already had the Moog Matriarch before buying the 101 and 707. Recently got the Prophet 5 Desktop
t still think the MC VA tones are pretty good. I just don’t expect them to sound exactly like specific makes and models of vintage analog synths. When I was auditioning VA brass patches for example, I just wanted something that sounded great to me - it didn’t have to sound exactly like a brass preset on a Jupiter 8, Prophet 5 or whatever.
I was briefly tempted to “upgrade” from MC-707 to Fantom to get access to the Model Expansions. But further research convinced me to abandon the idea. MC-707 has several features missing in the Fantom, as of the date of my research. I concluded I don’t need the Model Expansions after all.
A few months back I saw an old article or forum post with a guy showing how he could dump the settings of a Model expansion from a Fantom. The Model expansions are basically just an ‘overlay’ containing value ranges and macros etc, on top of the base Zencore engine.
It looked like a lot of work to dump everything and this is the only way to get the custom settings of each Model, but the concept was demonstrated.
Shortly after, Roland patched it out in a firmware update. So I think it is possible but maybe the performance isn’t acceptable on 707/101. Cant remember where I saw it now but it was a place where Roland pays attention, so maybe a Roland forum.
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Correct. More chips just ups the number of available voices. The trick is that ZEN-Core tones can vary wildly in required voices per note. Anywhere from 1 to (I think? At least?) 16. Each partial is a voice. A PCM partial with left and right sounds take two voices. TVF filter requires a voice. 12db/oct filter requires a voice. Then, of course, there’s unison that multiplies everything.
The vast majority of sounds are single-voice. But if you get really crazy with it, you can eat up polyphony fast.
This isn’t a big deal on a groove box where a number of your tracks are all but guaranteed to bass and percussion which are usually A) monophonic, and B) single-voice patches. I don’t think I’ve ever hit the limit on my 707.
But with an “arranger” synth like a FANTOM, I could see using more polyphonic, layered sounds. And that huge keyboard is there just waiting to be bashed on. Nice to have the extra voice count.
The RAM limit of the MCs, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me. I can only guess they were hoarding it all for the SP-404mkII? 
But also, seriously, if you’re looking to add sample/looping/FX to your setup, the 404 is fantastic and plays well with others.
You don’t even have to dump it from the FANTOM. You can just copy the bits out of an SVZ with a hex editor. Every patch saved with a “model” also contains all the settings to load it in a standard ZEN-Core patch. I was working on an app to make this easier for a while, but then I installed Ventura and Zenology stopped working ¬_¬
But for a time I was moving model patches over to my 707, and it never gave me trouble (with the exception of patches from the JD-800 — it required a new batch of PCMs that aren’t present on the MCs and I haven’t found a way to add them)
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I had a stab at understanding scatter last night and am still completely confused. There’s so much going on when you press a scatter pad it’s difficult to figure out what the parameters do, particularly when some of them are documented (in the reference I think ?) as interacting with each other.
The roland video manual didn’t get me very far.
Can someone get me over one hurdle by explaining from the settings scatter pads versus scatter steps. Does each pad get a 16-step sequence or ??
EDIT 1 day later: OIC … the steps refer to the sequence you get when you hold down the scatter button (rather than a pad)
Could really do with more of an explanation from roland. The scatter feature looks like something the designer thought was cool, the marketing department decided to keep because it was wild, but nobody thought that musicians (producers, whatever) might need to understand it for some subtler effects.
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I’ve done a video about it (Scatter) - It’s pretty cool once you design some yourself because some of the defaults are way In Your Face and it can do some nice performance effects that aren’t so BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM. 
If you hit SHIFT+Scatter you go into the edit Scatter mode and I’d recommend hitting CLEAR+OneOfTheScatterPads to start from scratch. Easier to understand WTF is in effect then.
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That pretty much sums it up!
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Good overview of 1.81 for MC-101 from teabreakbeats
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I will be one of the first to buy, if this ever happens.
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I’m starting to get my head round scatter a bit more now … actually, a more. apt metaphor might be I’ve just managed to peek my head around the door and get my bearings.
You really do have to put the time in as @darenager suggests … for me what worked was a fresh project, a 16-note arpeggio on one track (8 up, 8 down) and then mess with one or two parameters at a time.
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I played a 2-song set at a local open mic a few weeks ago on electric violin and MC-101. I wanted to avoid the typical song ending for this type of setup, in which the groovebox keeps playing the beat after the instrumentalist is finished, until the instrumentalist simply presses Stop.
Messing with the default Scatter buttons wasn’t terribly creative but it was a fun thing to do for a few seconds before pressing Stop. Hardly anybody in the audience would know or care either way about the geeky details of Scatter. 
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How do you sequence a note (tone track) longer than 5 … I know you can play in a longer note, but sequence one in (e.g, to fix a fluffed note) ? I have MC-101, if that makes a difference.
(Sure I read about a hack for it somewhere)
Hold down the button under the length knob, and use the main knob to adjust. Its very slow as its got a fine resolution, but if you do some finger gymnastics you can hold down shift as well, to do larger increments
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Any ideas how to enter a tie or a rest in auto advance recording when scale is other than chromatic?
You can’t!
Not sure, but try Note + Rest/Tie
This works for the octaves +/- pads, so I think it may also work for Rest/Tie
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