It’s a fun box
With that said. There’s no count-in.
TR-8S has ACB which neither the 707/101 has. Great for sound design.
I briefly owned 707 but the synth engine didn’t wow me so went back to the 101 for the ROM sounds. 101 is super focused w/ tight fader throws.
Also I didn’t want 2 big Roland boxes so for me I went TR-8S + MC-101 combo.
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Ok, I will try and talk you out of the MC-707.
They packed a lot in there, and it shows. The interface is intuitive in some area’s, and menu divey/just flat out ridiculous in others. And while the manual is better than some other Roland products, it is still a pain to work through. I just want to take a moment to give a shout out to Moog and Elektron here, because their manuals are well written, and easy to follow.
The screen on the 707 would have been bad 30 years ago, and it is just horrible now. The viewing angle is laughable.
You have to stop playback every time you want to save something. This is a workflow killer.
The FX are alright. They packed a lot of them in there. Some are decent, some just sound like a bad imitation.
The build is very plasticy, and the faders have a little wobble. It just feels a little cheap compared to some other Roland products I have owned. Again, they packed a lot in there, and they probably cut some corners to hit a price point.
The pads are hard, and they are large and spread out. Decent for banging out a drum beat, but for playing chords, they suck.
With all that said, for better or worse, they packed a whole lot in the MC-707. For an all-in-one solution, it delivers a lot of features.
A nice selection of ins and outs.
It is nice to have 8 faders, along with the assignable knobs per track.
Streaming individual tracks over USB is always the bee’s knees.
The sounds are ok. Not as good as the ACB, but they put some nice editing in options in there (again, very menu divey).
The ability to pull in clips and sequences from other projects while the sequencer is running is a great feature.
I would like to see them do something in-between the 101 and the 707, both size, and feature wise. Less ins and outs, but definitely physical inputs for sampling. A couple less faders is fine. Revisit the interface. Make it run on batteries. And a much better screen!!! Maybe call it a 701? Or a 107? Call me Roland. (Just kidding, we know they don’t listen to their customers.)
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I agree. Something like a six track version that optionally runs on batteries Would be perfect.
I spent some time with the 707 and once you got sounds you liked, I found it incredibly fast to get ideas going. Ironically, I think I made some of my best and most complete songs with it, but ended up returning it because I found the sound design to be laborious. I also didn’t like that there weren’t more options for which parameters could be assigned to the knobs. That was before the sampling update and I’ve regretted returning it at times. I think the best case scenario would be to have some tracks running drums and internal synth engines and a few tracks running midi out to some external synths and their audio into the faders. This would allow you to have more direct sound design capabilities. I did find it really fun and I thought it sounded good. Probably should’ve just kept it.
(For better or for worse, I found my way to the Octatrack, and I’m slowly learning the ways of the eight armed mind f*%<er.)
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I don’t know, at the price point and feature set, and the fact that you’re swapping out a DT, I don’t think I’d choose the 707. Synths sound good on it, at least. Maybe consider the MPC One? It’s kind of amazing how much it can do, it sounds good, the screen makes menu diving orders of magnitude better than dealing with the 707’s screen, the pads feel much better, and it has enormous flexibility when it comes to effects.
Or the Octatrack, of course, but that’s a bit more money.
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How long have you been using the Digitakt at this point? I would suggest maybe just making songs with only it for a little while if you want to try to speed up your comfort level with it, I suppose it still might not click for you. To me the Digitakt is the fastest drum sampler type device as far as fine tuning your one shot samples goes and working with slightly rougher samples, most other options to me feel like they work best with really well curated sample libraries and already polished sounds as apposed to quickly designing a drum sound on your synth sampling it and fine tuning it on the Digitakt to get it nice and snappy, a bit of a resonant filter envelope and overdrive to make it bump.
That said we all find are own paths with these instruments, if you’re not feeling the Digitakt and feel you gave it a fair shake there isn’t a huge reason not to explore other options if you got the time and money. You can always sell the MC-707 get a Digitakt again or move on to whatever other product you fancy. Best not to stress it too much, just try to be happy and productivity will often follow.
You asked about the synth engine but you said you would use it as main drummachine.
The drums on 707/101 are samples though.
So no real benefit of the synth engine here.
The TR8s might be better suited as main drummachine (at least my conclusion) since you have synth engines which are specifically designed towards drum sounds, while you can use samples as well.
That said, in my opinion the 707/101 synth engine sounds superb for a groovebox.
The huge polyphony is a real benefit over the monophonic digitakt tracks.
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I often hear people call the Digitakt “menu-divey”. I don’t get where this is coming from. It’s one button to switch to a parameter group and from there you have 90 percent of the controls. I have the TR-8S, and it has far more knobs to turn, yet i’m hitting the menu all the time. What is this unicorn knob-per-function drum machine for under $750 that i’m missing?
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I like menu diving.
Comes from when the only gear I had was a Wavestation. It felt exploratory at that time and still does to me.
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So… I’ve got it. What an ugly bulky machine. But I kinda made a not-so-shitty track (not a loop) on it already. You can’t copy/paste or rotate steps, right? Oh well. It is certainly not a thing to fall in love with and show to your friends. But it works! We’ll see.
OMG This screen is so bad!
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I guess they mean how if you’re on Track 1 but want to edit another one, you need to press Track and [Track Number], then hit Amp or whatever, change the parameter, then to edit Track 1 again, rinse and repeat over and over, hence the frustration. It never bothered me what I had one, but some people like things to be simpler, especially for live performance.
Edit: Also, to answer your latter question, Model:Samples is as close as it gets Elektron-wise
Maybe you should wait a few days, until Nick & Gaz’s Review is there:
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You can copy/paste and move steps. Check the latest update manual for the “how-to”
Found how to copy/paste, but still can’t find anything about moving. Thanks a lot anyway!
Edit: Found it!
The TR8S and DT work brilliantly well together! The new v2 TR8S software is a breath of air to this drum machine that is so nice for playing live. The TR8S as your DM will be a fraction of the cost of a 707 and the DT can be your sample buddy.
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A fraction? no.
local prices here:
€ 825 for 707
€ 599 for TR-8s
A fraction is at least half. Not 3/4 or more 
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It’s Nu Roland, which means the build quality is horrible.
Haven’t had a 707 though and maybe the quality is better, but I have owned a Digitakt and a 101 and the Digitakt feels like it’s been built to industrial standards, and the Roland to cheap toy standards.
Besides the cheap plastic feel of the 101, I also found the pads didn’t always trigger when live playing and the volume from the factory by default wasn’t loud enough and I had to menu dive every time to boast the volume from the eq settings, if memory serves me right…
I’m done with Nu Roland now after owning 4 Boutiques, the nasty keyboard for them, 2 MX-1’s and a few other things that didn’t last long. Keeping the VT-3 AND TB-3 and my vintage Roland gear.
You did ask to be talked out of it, before the fanboy attacks start.
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707 is actually not that bad. 101 look like it’s gonna break any moment. But elektrons are one of the best built devices i’ve seen. Even model:cycles feels nice and solid.
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went your way aswell, got an offer I couldnt refuse for an OT MK II.
Took it as a destiny message that DT had to go.
missed my Model Samples and its immediacy, so got an other one to feed OT some decent track ideas to sample to Flex and slice and mangle…also program change is great in between those two.
at this point if I wanted to stick to the topic I d say add a MC101 for its sounds to DT or OT workflow.
Even though I swapped my MC101 for a Dreadbox Typhon and couldnt be happier.
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After spending a couple more hours I must say I’m quite impressed with 707. Considering how many features it packs I think its design is very smart and intuitive. I think Nick Batt is right and they actually stole quite a lot from OT and elektron in general.
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