On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, sean bollin wrote: > Hi,
>I cant quite afford a TR-909 or 808 yet so Im planning on buying a TR-606 or >TR-707. >which one in general sounds better (close to a tr-909)? Um, neither. The 707 sounds pretty harsh and digital -- the best sounds are the claps and the hats. The kick sounds like someone kicking a metal wastebasket. It does have the Roland Step/Tap sequencer business, and that's easy to sort out. The 707 shuffle is killer. It has individual outs AND volume sliders so you can build up and break down a pattern. It's most useful live if you've pre-programmed all your beats into different panel, since in pattern play you can trigger patterns on the fly. And you can do that Richie Hawtin trick of setting the last step temporarily to 1 for a drumroll. It can also trigger analog drum brains like the tama techstar and simmons analog drum boxes. And it has a trigger output (on the side stick) that can clock an SH101 or MC202. And if that isn't enough, it has individual outputs for each sound. The 606 is all analog, and has the most brilliant drum sequencer ever made, because you can switch between pattern and edit mode on the fly. There are extensive mods you can do to bring individual sounds out and add more control over the sound. Biggest downfall -- you've heard all those sounds a million times before, and the kick is wimpy unless you mod it for individual outputs and put in a decay time knob. To just learn how to cane a drum machine, I would go with the 606. >and also, which one would make more sense to own in someone starting to >build up enough equipment to write some tracks? Well they're a tool but the sounds are a bit dated and wimpy. Now if you have a nice mixer and a bunch of effects to mess them up they're great, but on their own they're not much use. For standalone coolness you can't beat the 606 -- leave your laptop at home and take this baby on the plane. >opinions on other synths/drum machines up to $400 would be appreciated also, Really the best thing you can do if you have a PC is to buy fruityloops software (http://www.fruityloops.com) -- it can do loads more than any hardware box. If you must have an actual drum machine, look at the Korg Electribe line, especially that new sampling box. You can use samples to get going, and since you can get samples of just about everything on the web, getting a sampler is like getting a load of instruments for free.