I’ve had my 707 for a few years and I think I have been going at it all wrong. My process was always to pick 5 or 6 sounds that I wanted in the final project and address the mix first. Find sounds that blend well. Find sounds among that 4000+ presets and thousands of Roland Cloud options. I know, it sounds stupid, even to me as I type this, but that is the trap that I easily fall into when working with this machine. It was not until I watched the Ron Cavagnaro “MC7070 Boot Camp” videos that I started considering a different approach. And it took watching the first video several times for me to get past the trap of 1000’s of presets and just create sounds as I need them. Once you do it a few times it is actually easy to create sounds from scratch on the 707. So now that I have transitioned form managing sounds to making music I have a few questions for those more successful with the 707 than me.
Do you break out drum parts among channels. Maybe bass and hi-hat on separate channels? Or do you keep it all together with plans to move drums to a different unit at a later time?
How many channels do you normally use for synth sounds? (A reverse question of how many channels to assign to drum and bass parts.)
How far into the process do you go before you start farming out parts to other boxes? Or do you normally get everything you want with the one box?
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I mostly program sounds from scratch because I generally find preset browsing tedious, so I only do it if I’m looking for some specific on board sound (usually acoustic instrument or drum). I tried separating drums to kick, snare, hats & percussion, but at the end decided to keep them on one track, which gave me more flexibility using mutes and I also like to have tracks available for other sounds, because I prefer to mix them in&out using faders instead of switching clips/scenes. I’d love to be able to “lock” drum track in mute mode so it would free one hand to do other things, but sadly can’t be done.
I’d prefer to do it all in one box and it works quite well for music where I find 707 particularly good at, in my case synthwave and ambient. I added Keystep 37 and reverb pedal, because I find 707 a bit lacking in long reverbs (also nice have a few additional knobs). I couldn’t make it work for psytrance, so here I have larger setup based around Digitakt, where 707 serves just as a mixer / fx box for some other gear and additional (multitimbral poly) synth and stereo sampler.
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I do techno-adjacent music with the 707, and fairly minimal at that. So usually start and finish it all on-device. If I know I’m going to want to do a lot of live tweaking of drums, I’ll sometimes rope in my TR-8 for that from the start. But if not, I put all percussion and usually some risers or ear candy on one track. Depending on how melodic it ends up being, I might try to squeeze a sub-bass in there too.
If not, then it’s a track for sub bass. One for 303 bass. One for pads. One for arps. One for lead. That’s kind of it. Usually with a groove box I’d reserve a track or two for some different pad and lead for a breakdown, but with the clip-based flow of the 707 I don’t find that necessary.
That means by the time I’m nearing the finish line I have 2-3 tracks free. I’ll use these to quickly add filler or ear candy as needed, or sometimes to bounce loops if polyphony is getting congested. Or, if something needs a kick of MFX for a bar or something that the global sends won’t give me I’ll dual track it to one of those empty ones where it can have a unique FX assigned to its partial. That kind of stuff. But it’s not unusual for me to finish a song with only 6 tracks used.
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Since Digitakt 2 came out I am having some gas for it but then I thought: Whatever you want to buy it for; Try do that with MC-707 first.
And that gave it another quality. New Tone track; load a sample and start tweaking. Went through the Pad and Instrument settings again.
When I need a full pad / strings for the background I often use a preset.
Next to this I often use the 707 with external synths. Works great; precise sequencing, use CC motion and sample the phrases. Export and load in a drumtrack.
My latest purchase is a SP 404 mk2 and using that has also changed the way I use the 707. Plus having more tracks with two samplers makes that I can use the 707 for more sound design.
I also tried a template to use a 707 track to sequence the SP. Worked well but I need another go at it because it’s new to me.
But mostly I use track 1 for drums + comp, track 2 for synthbass and the rest synths.
Even 707 internal synthclips get often sampled in Looper Track 8 to export to use in SP or Cubase.
I like to see what another box / workflow brings.
And sure: Ron Cavagnaro’s videos helped a lot.
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