Roland TR-8S

Partnered up the TR. Finding my flow, slowly

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Did you test this on your TR-8S?

Nothing wrong; thatā€™s how an 808 behaves. :slight_smile:

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You have a TR-8S and TR-808 to confirm?

I found this old thread on GS.

Guessing the 808 kick has envelopes that do not reset on every hit, therefore accumulating charge? Could explain this sorta behaviourā€¦ If so, thatā€™d be a very obvious thing for Roland to model, its not subtle and affects dynamism greatly.

kinda like the 303 capacitors that wonā€™t fully discharge between successive accents.

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I have not heard a TR-8s doing this so canā€™t comment on the accuracy of its 808 BD behaviour, but on a TR-808 with the decay set such that it has not fully decayed before the next hit, you get what sounds like a similar effect to what is being described - basically the TR-808 bass drum is a resonant filter almost at the point of oscillation, whenever it is triggered it ā€˜excitesā€™ the filter into starting to oscillate, if the oscillation is still occurring from a previous hit when a new hit arrives it canā€™t stop, which is a very similar behaviour to how a real drum with a long decay would behave - unless you damped it first. You can easily experiment with a resonant filter that can self oscillate and create a similar effect, the resonance will set the ā€˜decay timeā€™ and the cutoff will set the pitch, send a very short pulse into the filters input and adjust the resonance and cutoff to make all kinds of analog percussion sounds.

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Having a read of the Tr8s manual. Its not that clear about using pattern chains.

Is there a limit to how many patterns you can have in a chain?

I saw one for Ā£108 UK yesterday in the last hour or so of its bidding.

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That seems like a BIG pain in the ass to me. Honestly if they are going to allow note tuning of samples they NEED to introduce a chromatic note input mode.

I have digtone and really like it a lot. I have been thinking that the TR8s is a really fun fit with it for simple to make bread and butter drums.

Thatā€™s what I decided to do, and my TR-8S arrives today. But I thinking Iā€™m kind of getting cold feet about it, and might not open the TR-8S right away. Itā€™s kind of a lame reason, but the main reason is its size. I just really donā€™t like how big it is lol. Also, the thought of getting another Digitone instead is still quite compelling in my mind.

Great combo!
Two fun great sounding machines
I simply canā€™t say enough about them, they take over in a good way
The TR8s is a true evolution for the TR series, Anyone whoā€™s ever used a Roland drum machine will feel right at home

Youā€™ll be fine. Itā€™s not as gaudy big like the DJS

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Yeah. itā€™s become obviously apparent to me that when I get home, the odds of me not opening that box right away are very weak.

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Weak. Positively weak

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So I played with this a bit last night, and my first impressions are great. It has a better build than I was anticipating; thank goodness for the matte black (glossy black plastic is the worse). The knobs are very firm, and everything feels quite solid. I think it looks slick.

The effects sounded good to me. I particularly like the compressor, and the transient effect. The compressor is very useful; I was able to make things sound nice and punchy with it, and the wide selection of knees is really nice. The reverb is good, but I need more time messing with it to get a better impression. All in all, the effects are very usable imo.

Something that I think wouldā€™ve been really nice for the sample-side of this machine is the ability to assign the sample starting point to the CTRL knob. Itā€™s nice you can fine-tune the starting point though. I think I can actually still have a decent workflow of chopping samples in the box by assigning the same sample to multiple instruments. With 11 instruments to work with, I donā€™t think Iā€™d have issues with feeling too limited.

Iā€™m liking the idea of using this unit by itself to make some sample-based beats (with ACB drums) I can practice scratching over. Iā€™m planning on loading up a bunch of samples from my cassette collection (in stereo), chopping them up with a few of the available instrument tracks, assigning all their outputs to the same pair of assignable outs, and routing those assignable outs back to the TR-8Sā€™s audio inputs so I can side-chain that audio :sunglasses:

EDIT: I just realized edits to samples are global. So in order to chop samples the way I described, youā€™d need to make multiple copies of the same sample with different names (i.e. Sample1, Sample2, Sample3ā€¦ ). Too bad there isnā€™t the ability to copy samples in the box; I guess Iā€™ll just have to preemptively make multiple copies of samples I know that Iā€™m going to want to chop before saving them to the SD card.

EDIT2: Maybe, when you try importing a sample with the same name twice, it gives you the option of renaming the sample. That would be REALLY nice, and would cut out the step of having to preemptively make multiple copies of the same sample with different names for samples youā€™d like to edit in multiple ways on multiple instrument tracks in the same kit. Iā€™ll have to check this later.

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whats the filtering like on the TR8S
Can you automate bandpass sweeps over 8 bars ( interested in that effect that was popular around 1999-2000)

It sounds to me that it is very limited as a sampler it would have been nice if it had chopping, slicing, resampling, etcā€¦ Roland decided to call it TR-8S but it is still more or less a drum machine. Iā€™ve owned a lot of Roland products and they always seem to use there own sounds. My drums are a good example all their modules are processed sounds that they created and donā€™t allow the use of vstā€™s even my spd-sx has limited sampling features. I know Roland could make a good sampler but they just refuse to.