Nobody has any ‘responsibility’ to do anything, this is an Electron Forum, a bit of fun- its not Roland’s official support!
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Well the Digitone II is perhaps the most versatile in my set up. At least for house and techno. The 707 drums sound hella dope with the RE-303 in my rig.
If you don’t have a dedicated sequencer, you could sequence the 303 with a midi track of the Digitone II and still have 15 trigs, plus a ton of voices to do pads, drums…or whatever.
You can cut a full length with just these boxes and sound retro-modern-experintal across multiple genres.
Hell, you could take this set up live and cover even more ground if you’re thinking of using the TR1000 for sampling duties.
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Has anyone else found the response of the step keys to be kind of sluggish?
I’m finding that when I try to play in sequence data via INST REC, things often end up slightly late relative to where I played them. And with quantize set to on, things often end up on later steps.
I’ve also experienced sluggishness with the start button when trying to start the machine in time with something that’s already playing (without any clock connection between source and 1000). I have to press the start button ever so slightly ahead of the beat to get it to start on time.
One caveat: when I rest my fingers on the keys and push in without lifting my finger, the buttons seem to respond as expected. However, I’m a professional pianist so playing the keys this way feels very strange and not something I want to adapt to. Assuming this isn’t an issue with my particular unit, here’s hoping this is something that could be addressed by tweaking the key response in firmware.
Honestly, no I haven’t - not saying it’s not a thing just that it’s not my experience. I did notice some menus were sluggish before, but this seemed to be fixed with the last update. Are you on the latest v1.14 firmware?
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So was practising live transitioning between two different songs yesterday and noticed that unfortunately the pattern gap issue also affects any external audio you have routed to the TR-1000 inputs. There is a distinct pause in the external audio when it changes kit.
Not great for live performance as was hoping to have my other gear routed into the TR-1000 through a submixer for the Master and Analog FX.
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Yeah this is frustrating. It’s pretty easy to work around the audio gap with regards to drums when sequencing from my Hapax as it has a pre-send function which makes the kit change happen about 1 step before the end of the pattern, so can just create a kit change pattern which doesn’t have any drums in the last bar/ half bar or whatever. Easy to make this sound natural, but less so with a bassline or whatever, running through the audio in.
I do hope they sort this issue, I’m sure I’ll still manage to work around it but would rather not have to! And very frustrating for those sequencing/ changing kits in the 1k. Would be interesting to hear about any other workarounds people have for this issue with regards to performance
Yeah, I’m not too bothered when using it for studio use to create songs as I usually just stick to one kit, but I don’t think I could confidently transition during live performances. Trouble is the box is clearly designed for live use so when writing songs, I don’t even bother assigning most of the knobs unless I want to create some motion in a pattern as all the sound design can be done using the 6 control knobs. I also don’t bother setting up the Morph slider as there’s little point as this is a live performance control which can’t be recorded as Motion.
So as a live performance machine it has issues with seamless transitions, and as a studio tool most of the performance controls aren’t needed.
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You are missing out if you don’t use the morph slider. I used it when I recorded and got all kinds of cool blends and variations. It’s one of the few features in the machine I really miss.
Going to rectify that with a Drop midi controller at some point. It’s not the exact same thing but it can accomplish similar tricks.
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So I take it, that if there is a longer sample playing out on one of the channels on the 1000, that the sample also has a bit of a silence/gap when switching kits on the machine?
The drop looks amazing! Would definitely consider one of those of I decided the 1k wasn’t for me. I do love the morph slider, including studio use, I like the looseness of at least some manually programmed motion, as opposed to automation lines.
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Made a little video showing my difficulty in real time recording. Here I’m using 16 VELO mode and quantize is on. Not a single attempt gets recorded the way I expected. Are others having more luck with this? Doubt it’s a hardware issue but if it is I want to find out while I’m still within the return/exchange window. https://youtu.be/vrfZBh23wtE?si=3_EvxZ-OEJQBG5eW
Wow. That is way off. Crazy.
I wish I could test a different one for you but I haven’t been able to procure one yet
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That was supposed to have been fixed in the latest firmware.
Hmm, first thing I did when I got it was update the firmware. Support mentioned that there were some MIDI timing issues that were fixed in the most recent firmware (1.14), but they all seemed related to situations where the 1000 was synced (not the case in my setup). I’ve forwarded the video to support. Will see what they say.
- Make the TR-1000 the master clock (All Tracks mode) → problem solved.
- Search this thread for every timing-related post. I know it got a bit messy in here.
- Summary for you:
The TR-1000 has major latency when it’s a MIDI slave in All Tracks mode. It’s around >50ms. There’s no real fix, and I honestly doubt Roland can improve it much. They are aware of this.
You can make it feel more responsive by switching to Layered Gens mode (down to around 8ms), but then you’re dealing with significantly more jitter (which, to be fair, can have a certain charming groove). The trade-off is that your samples are internally ~8 ms late.
Firmware 1.14 added latency compensation, but it comes with another cost: it starts “lumpy/unstable” on the first beats. Not surprising—there’s no flux compensator in there. The underlying latency is still the same.
Because the TR-1000 is so good and increasingly becoming the centerpiece of my setup, I’ve adapted my studio workflow:
- For arranging/organizing and when it needs sync with my DAW, I run it as a MIDI slave, clocked by my Multiclock, which itself is audio-clocked by the DAW.
- But when it’s performance time, I switch the TR-1000 to master, and it clocks the Multiclock, which then clocks my other sequencers/hardware. The DAW is than unsynced. I use it anyway only as a tape recorder.
I’m extremely timing-sensitive, and this latency really kills the fun. It’s a big downside, but the TR-1000 ticks so many other boxes that I’m swallowing it.
A bitter pill. 
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Thanks for the info. Appreciate it. To be clear, I’ve experienced all of this using the TR-1000 by itself without any other gear attached.
I tried switching to Layered Gens mode, which did seem to increase the responsiveness and accuracy of live recorded parts. Still getting a pretty high error rate though.
No problems to bang it on live when it’s Master Clock (all tracks mode). Check under Project ->General->Tempo Sync: internal.
Okay, thanks. I tried with that setting (was set to ‘auto’ previously) but still getting the same result.
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Love this quote, and I do know. 
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Maybe a factory reset?
Like I mentioned before: when the TR-1k is running on its internal clock, it responds fine. It’s not razor-sharp clockwork, but I don’t feel any excessive latency that way. When I play live and record off-beat hi-hat or clap patterns, they land right on the grid in the recording — so from my feel it should be under ~7–8 ms or even lower.
On a good day I don’t even need quantization… but that depends on how mean my wife was to me that day! 
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