Serious Question to 80's Gearheads and Drum Machines Lovers

mr_debauch wrote:you need more drum sounds... get 808 and 909 sound kits.. in fact get all the roland TR drum kits... the mpc will be fine for that

Yep. In my opinion Roland has always come with the tight drum sounds. Remember the DR 202 drum machine? That was a solid piece of gear with great hip hop drum sounds and bass. I think if I see one again for cheap I might cop it. I also had the 202 sampler that looked just like the drum machine. After the 202 I got the DR670. (The grey one. I think the blue one was the DR770) The 670 had some really good rock and roll drums, as well as house and techno type sounds. There were a few kits that were good for Hip Hop on there but in my opinion, not that many. The 202 was also very easy to tweak.

Right now I use a combination between the Roland TR-8 and Ensoniq MP-7. The MP-7 is geared towards Hip Hop but I remember they also had an XP - 7 (I think thats the name. It's Yellow. The MP-7 is purple.) That was another piece of gear that was designed for house, techno, dance, etc.

Overall, the MP - 7 is the best in terms of being user freindly and having the ability to easily tweak the sounds. The XP - 7 is exactly the same however, if you want those 80's type sounds, Roland is the way to go.

i kind of did a little 80's inspired beat a few months ago (it was released on my crew's monthly beat tape)

it obviously is modern but with some oldschool inspiration





and if those kinds of drums are what you are after... i can let you know what exactly i used to make that.

what about a roland cr-8000
it has great sounds, pretty close to the 808.
not sure how much they sell for

Again, much thanks for all your posts, guys!

And thanks to Mr. Debauch for the track. It's pretty close sonically to what I was thinking about (but damn, these drums are sooo clean - I have to reset my ears after all those years of 90's hip-hop sound haha). And it's a very good stuff btw.

I'll try to hunt something on ebay around Western Europe, because the shipping fees from USA or Japan would kill me.

Everyhing best, mates and a lot of heavy, dirty, filthy, smooth, mellow banging beats in the New Year 2016!
Cheers!

If you want a 80's drum machine sound, you might just want to look at old Korg, Yamaha, Roland, Kawai drum machines. Most are getting up there in price due to supply & demand, & others are cheap if you can find them. Just do your homework at www.vintagesynth.com & learn all you can about them. Then listen to any vids you can find on YouTube to see if it's the sound you want. 80's drum machines were sampled at a lower bit quality (8-12 bits), and they kind of sounded like plastic. But that's their charm as well. But most of their sequencers (not the Rolands) were horrible on hard to read LCD screens, and there wasn't much as far as editing them since they were crudely sampled. A Yamaha RX5 however kind of had the power of a DX7, but it wasn't really going to give you operators or carriers to mess with. But it was able to do drums well, but sometimes you could get a horn stab or synth part from it. It supports multi outs so you can toss it into effect units, kaoss pads, guitar pedals, filters, for insane sounds. But later models in the Yamaha RX line just went stereo out, and the editing was non existent. So just do your homework.