Noodling on the Roland CR-78

A few years back I got into another analog synth/drum machine phase and decided to pick up a CR-78. This is a drum machine released by Roland in 1978 with all analog voices (read: perfect recipe for cheese). A more thorough description can be found at the Wikipedia article here.

Surprisingly, a number of late 70s / early 80s artists made use of the CR-78. The main survivor of these is Phil Collins with "In the Air Tonight" (also featuring smooth Prophet 5 synth pads and those gated reverb drums at the climax). Hall and Oates had a few hits using the CR-78 as well, like "Kiss On My List" (for some reason they decided this would make a great opener for the song before the real drums enter .. I guess that works in 80s rationale).

In an effort to start using this roomful of gear I've collected, I uploaded a video of me noodling around on the CR-78 (note to self: shell out the bucks for a camcorder interface cable). This includes a brief tour of the rhythms, automatic fills, voice cancelling, etc; as well as programming up the rhythms for the songs mentioned above. In case anyone's interested (yeah right!), "In the Air Tonight" uses the "Disco-2" (A) rhythm with snare cancelled out; "Kiss On My List" uses "Rock-1" (A) with automatic fill 7.



If you listen to the original version of "In the Air Tonight", the bass drum is doing its own thing on every other repeat. You can select multiple rhythms at once on the CR-78, but I haven't found any permutation that gives this bass drum pattern. The only way I could replicate this (and maybe it's the way Phil did it as well) was to program a custom bass drum rhythm and have this play on top of the preset rhythm. This is clearly an important matter that warrants further investigation ..

Update: I decided to splurge for a $7.99 Firewire cable so I could re-record this video in a little higher quality. Who can argue with high quality analog Bossa Nova beats?