Just grabbed a 101 today. Looks a good buy
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Adorable machine (101) & you got resample so more than 4 tracks
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All the Rolands seem to have their legendary drumkits in them. You can get a JDXi nowadays for less than £400. It has 4 tracks and a great sequencer plus the bonus of synth engines. I might get one myself for doing some 80’s stuff on the fly.
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for me these new roland boxes spit out nostalgia sound instantly with a great enough sequencer that has quite a lot of modern features. Sampling is a nice bonus, I think there are better options if you are looking for a sampler.
But imo they sound great without big effort, that‘s what set them apart for me from quite a few other grooveboxes in that price and feature range.
And the 707 synth engine is really deep, I don‘t think deluge or mpc live can come any close to that (regarding onboard synth - as I said sampling is a different story)
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Playability!
yes, also the faders on these rolands play a big part of jamming fun and playability.
All grooveboxes and drummachines should have faders!!
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faders are fantastic!
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Bought 2 sold 2
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I agree for initially mixing the levels, but once in a live performance mode, surely you’re just throwing them to the top or bottom, so don’t mute switches and solo buttons suffice here?
Unless they can be assigned to different parameters? 
I’m a recent 707 owner with a few complaints that you might find useful - stuff I’d have liked to have known going in, but hasn’t always been covered in reviews.
Clip chaining is currently bugged so that switching clips cuts off the sound of the previous clip, making it unusable unless you deal exclusively in very short sounds. I’ve had this verified by other users and have a support call with Roland pending. This is a bummer because it’s a really interesting mode with a lot of potential - eight tracks, all with their own clip chains based around different divisions and lengths gives this a flexibility and potential rarely seen in hardware - but only if it works, so fingers crossed this will be fixed soon enough.
The sample and hold LFO is not random, so if you retrigger it you get the same pattern every time. This is very frustrating for synth design, especially because the synth engine is otherwise very well specced.
P-locking the filter cutoff is not as useful as it should be, because the sound starts playing before the filter change. Hopefully another fixable issue.
Card access is slow, which seems to be everyone’s experience regardless of card type.
I haven’t had any voice stealing issues yet, but it’s obvious that the 128 voice polyphony is a rather disingenuous claim - all manner of factors eat into this. Still, I expect it to be fine for most use cases.
Sound design is frustrated somewhat by the sheer volume of PCM sounds on the unit, which aren’t organised in any helpful way. If you want a particular Juno wave, you’d better have the manual handy to look it up.
On the other hand, this machine has tons of potential, and is already excellent in many areas. It sounds great across the board - VA, samples and PCM waves are all usable and flexible. The sound design engine is deep enough to keep me engaged and menu-diving is handled well - I don’t find it any more onerous than the Digitone or A4. The effects are generally great and bring a lot of potential to the table.
The stock sounds have some excellent patches, though arguably there are more than there need to be. The drum kits are similarly good - it’s hard to fault it in terms of the sounds it makes.
Performance-wise, you can assign each channel’s 3 knobs to a lot of destinations, so with a little setup you have a lot of scope for tweaking. Of course you have the sliders too, and a well-done mute mode (one pad for synced mutes, one for immediate). Scatter, which I usually don’t care for, is made useful by the design feature, so you’re not tied to the hyperactive defaults.
With the recent updates you can use it as a four-channel mixer with an extra four channels of its own, or alternatively make use of the stereo send and return, which is a really nice feature to have.
I haven’t gone too far into the sampling yet, but it seems like a decent setup and supports synced recording, which is always nice to have.
I think it needs a bit more attention from Roland, but it’s certainly strong competition for the Digitakt. It can’t match Elektron’s sequencing features, but if you can live without the deep p-locks and trig conditions (and the screen, I guess, which is more pleasant on the DT), you gain so much more than the price difference might suggest. It feels good to use, and it sounds great.
Since you asked about the synth engine specifically - it’s very good. Four layers, some extensive cross-mod options, a variety of sound sources and filters, and a sensible left-to-right editing screen that makes good use of the controls. It’s very Roland, which isn’t a bad thing at all - just more traditional than leftfield. Throw the FX slot and resampling into the mix and there’s very little you can’t do here. I don’t think you’ll easily get wild modular sounds out of it - the mod matrix is relatively small compared to something like the Microfreak, for example - but as a subtractive synth engine, it delivers. My main concern is that the S&H LFO issue indicates some corner-cutting under the hood - but beyond the LFO I’ve seen nothing to suggest this.
Hope that helps!
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Hello all !
I’ve just flipped my OT Mk II for a MC707, after 6 months using and gigging with the MC101. Here’s why:
- recent updates made the MC707 scarily close to the OT now with the audio inserts, sample slicing and so on;
- filters, FXs, LFOs and envelopes feel better with the Roland. I don’t get those “weird blind spots” the OT had;
- while the OT still has an edge for sound design and experimentations, I find the MC707 faster to work with and more predictable in a live environment;
- there are tons of usable presets, FXs to start working with;
- samples, sequences and settings are saved together in clips, amalgamated in a single project file. The OT structure had advantages, but was also weirdly compartmentalized;
- sound engine of the Roland is surprisingly clean and detailed.
Again, the Elektron stuff is obvioulsy more advanced. But in my book, faster and more predictable in a live setting trumps complexity each time…
Cheers !
-N
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Fading stuff in and out intuitively is often a way more subtle way to introduce elements of a track than just hitting mute buttons.
On the elektrons you have to select the desired track first and the endless encoders are not the best option for fading/in out imo.
Push and turn is too immediate and not that controlled, while only turning takes forever to bring the level up.
You are certainly not able to fade several tracks at once withouth assigning a scene, which makes it less immediate again.
On the DN/DT I‘m not sure if you can select tracks at all while in mute mode (probably I missed a button combo) so selecting track and turning volume is tediously when you have to jump in and out of mute mode.
Sure you can use a cheap midi controller, but it‘s great if faders integrated into the machine.
And it‘s still great fun to just throw them up or down completely 
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The kind of info i wanted to hear about.
Thanks
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You make some good points there. Cheers!
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On DT you just hold the track button and push the track you want, works the same in and out of mute mode. I’d agree that 0-127 is a bit too slow on the encoders, although if you design your tracks around the sweet spot being about 80 then you can pretty easily do a proper fade ins with them.
I think a reason to potentially avoid on the new MC line is the sound engine for me, more so that the sound of it just isnt very inspiring. It’s good enough to make enjoyable tracks but every time I hear an MC707 only track I can tell it would bother me working so much in that engine. Not that MC707 only music is bad, but if I broke down it to individual parts the individual sounds dont inspired me to have a conversation with them. I think it depends though, if you derive inspiration from raw sound quality the TR8S is probably a much better offering from roland.
i completely feel the opposite. Always interesting how taste can differ 
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Yeah that is the beauty of all these different instruments and music being made, I suppose I know the MC707 isn’t for me but I certainly can appreciate music being made with it. I suppose I still feel a bit spoiled by the sound of the digital ACB engines… if they managed a 16 voice ACB groove box with all the synth plug outs I would be pretty over the moon but maybe that is just not in the cards for the ACB tech.
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I would say that the fun (and the point) of this kind of machine is composition and the arrangements since you have access to multiple parts and an integrated sequencer. I don’t think it is meant to be the best in term of technology or sound design; I see it more as a “creation platform”, like you are given tons of building blocks and tools to work with, but no instructions.
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No worries ! Don’t hesitate if you have specific questions. -N