The R70 is the latest 'Intelligent' drum machine from Roland. The words 'Human Rhythm Composer' are emblazoned on its front panel and, as you will see, this aptly describes its overall concept. The same legend was previously borne by the R8 and R5, and it's no surprise therefore to find that the R70 has inherited many of their 'feel' functions. However, it also adds digital effects — a drum machine first — and features the innovation of a 'positional pad', which gives you control over the 'feel' parameters.

The unit is of all plastic construction, and is finished in Roland's standard battleship grey. The top surface is about 14" x 8" in size, with well positioned buttons. You shouldn't have any problems in hitting two at a time. The right-hand half contains the 16 oval drum pads and one elongated positional pad.

There are six pad banks, between which you can switch, so you have access to more than just 16 sounds. There is a small central strip with Roll, Flam, Bank, Multi, Erase and Shift selection buttons. The left-hand side contains a numeric keypad and function keys, grouped together in four blocks. Standard tape recorder-style controls are at the bottom. The rear panel contains the usual MIDI sockets, four audio outputs, headphone and tape sync sockets, plus a footswitch and memory card slot. There are two sliders for volume and data entry. The display is a standard yellow 16x2 backlit LCD. Power is provided by a standard Roland 9V power unit, but no battery operation is available.

Two manuals accompany the R70 — one is a fairly friendly user guide, and the other is a comprehensive reference tome. You find your way around the display with a pair of left/right cursor keys, which cause the parameters to flash as you reach each one. An LED above each arrow key lets you know if there is another page beyond the one currently selected. Some of the functions have several pages, so you will sometimes find yourself doing a fair amount of button pushing when moving between them. Certain areas of the machine do have short cuts to avoid this though.

You can store 100 patterns, with 99 measures per pattern. Up to 20 songs can be stored. A card slot is provided for use with an M256E memory card. This effectively doubles the available memory, as each M256E stores 100 patterns and 20 songs. The manual claims that you can create a song in the internal memory, using card patterns, without having the card present. Unfortunately you cannot play the song if you do this. Several of the front panel buttons can be assigned to a footswitch, allowing you to remotely switch between different pad banks, or start and stop playback.

THE SOUNDS

The R70 contains 210 16-bit sounds, plus 32 user definable sounds using internal samples, giving a total of 242. The range and quality are very good, and I couldn't find anything unusable. There are 27 kicks, 44 snares, nine types of toms and a good assortment of hi-hats and cymbals. We also find some nice latin percussion, including three pandeiro samples and a very rude sounding cuica. In the Roland Hall Of Fame section are such classics as the TR808, 606 and CR78. The 909 snare and kick are also present but — horror of horrors — there are no 909 hi-hats! I managed to program my own imitation, but it wasn't a patch on the original. I had great fun with the wonderful toms in bank C, recreating the soundtrack to a certain sport shoe advert. There are also some ambience samples which provide additional tonal flexibility, especially when layered.

The sounds are organised into six banks, each bank having three groups of 16 sounds. You can edit 10 sound parameters for each instrument. Attack Damping varies the slope of the attack envelope, higher values producing a softer attack. Pitch is variable over a range of plus or minus 480 cents, in 10 cent steps. Envelope Decay is variable too, although on certain sounds (rim shots, for example) it has little effect. Other sounds, like the rock toms, sound a bit odd with a very long decay, but you can take advantage of this to produce a drone type of effect, with some added detuning. You can use velocity to shift pitch up, but not down.

Our fourth parameter is Nuance, defined by my dictionary as "a delicate degree or shade of difference perceived by any of the senses". If you take a snare drum, a low Nuance figure would produce the sound of a strike near the edge, and a high value that of a strike near the centre. The parameter is not available on all sounds. Assign Group enables you to make one sound cut another off, obviously useful for making realistic hi-hats. Polyphony can be set either to mono (single voice), or poly so that previous voices continue when a new one is triggered. The latter is mainly useful for cymbals, and anything with a long decay.

It is also possible to layer two sounds together. This function does not allow for velocity switching or crossfades as such, but with careful programming you can get some interesting results. Finally, you can specify whether a sound should ignore or respond to MIDI note off messages. If it is set to respond then the sound stops when a note off is received (handy for simulating the choking of a cymbal). The instrument copy function lets us set up the 32 user instruments, and these can be edited just like the factory sounds. It's nice to see a machine where the factory 'presets' are actually programmable, and if you mess them up they can easily be initialized back to their original settings.

MIXING

The R70 has good internal audio mixing capabilities in the form of a 16 into 4 mixer with two aux sends (the sends are purely internal, to the R70's digital effects section). A graphic level display shows each instrument's volume, pan and effects send level. Simply tap the pad that plays the sound you want to edit, select the parameter, and adjust for maximum listening pleasure. There are two extra audio outputs on the rear panel, in addition to the main stereo pair. If you use an individual output for any sound this prevents you from applying digital effects; they can only be used on instruments in the stereo mix. The only major problem with this mixer is that the effects sends are pre-fader! This means that if you change the volume of the sound here, the effects amount stays the same. So you have to go to the effects send level and re-adjust it. This can be a little tedious when trying to get a nice mix together, although you could probably get round it by adjusting the level in the pattern edit mode.

THERE'S REVERB JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

As mentioned above you have two effects to play with. One is either reverb or delay, the other chorus or flanger. The reverb effect offers hall, room, and plate algorithms, and you have control over reverb time and low-pass filtering. Delays 1 and 2 provide a stereo delay with up to 450ms on each side, independently adjustable. The chorus effect has a delay of up to 30ms, with the usual feedback and mod rate/depth controls. The flanger produces anything from subtle metallic to heavily modulated 'Dalek'-type sounds. Although these effects are very basic, they produce reasonable results when used with a bit of thought. A full blown multi-effects system would increase the cost of the unit and, let's face it, you're unlikely to need a stereo overdrive-leslie-rotor treatment on a drum kit. Another handy feature on the mixer is Solo, which enables you to hear a single instrument while you are editing a pattern.

PADS AND POSITIONS

In addition to the 16 conventional pads there is an elongated 'positional pad' on which a sound parameter can be varied from one end to the other — so, hitting the extreme left side of the pad could produce a low note, while moving your point of impact further right would produce successively higher pitches. Decay, nuance and pan can also be assigned.

It is very easy to assign sounds to pads. You select pad assign mode and hit the required pad. The display shows the current sound, and you can scroll through until you hear the one you want. Pad dynamics are easily controlled, and can be set to a constant value of 64 or over the full 0 to 127 range. This setting applies to all pads and cannot be set individually or for each bank, unfortunately. As with the sound parameters, you can reset a pad assignment to the factory setting, or even reset the whole bank.

In Multi-instrument mode, you can assign the same sound to be played by all 16 pads, with different pitch, nuance, decay or pan parameters on each pad. Default maps for these values can be selected for each parameter, or you can edit your own values. The factory multi-mode default gives you four bass sounds to play with. It would have been nice to have a kettle drum or marimba sample as well, as these are perfect candidates for this mode of operation.

"The expert mode is essentially an automatic composer that can construct patterns or songs in a given style. There are 17 styles available including rock, jazz, samba etc, plus some modern additions such as house/rap and dance."

GETTING TO GRIPS WITH RHYTHM

As the manual tells us, "To make good rhythms actually, proceed to put each function together." Quite so — let's see how we do this. Real time recording is quite easy, and the first thing to do is to set the required time signature and pattern length. Quantisation is variable from 8th note to 48th note, and there's also a 'high resolution' (unquantised) mode which gives 384th note divisions. A metronome is available, but you cannot set a count in. This can be annoying if you work with long patterns, as you have to either wait for the pattern to cycle round, or start your playing/overdubbing a bar into the pattern. Alternatively you could add an extra bar to the front of your pattern as a count in, and delete it when you have finished recording.

Real time erase is carried out by holding Erase and the appropriate pad, as your pattern loops round. You can also erase all instruments or just one from a pattern, in a single stroke.

You can create rolls by holding the Roll button and the appropriate pad; flams are created in a similar fashion. Various rates can be set for roll value, and flam ratios and intervals are also variable. Don't forget that if you have the roll rate set to 32nd and quantisation set to 16ths, you will only get 16th note rolls when playing back your recording. As you'd expect, you have a decent range of editing functions such as insert delete, copy, append, and merge. In fact most of these functions are common to songs, patterns and measures.

Merge is very useful and allows you to take selected instruments from one pattern and put them into another. Global edit allows you to make changes to each instrument within a pattern. Patterns can be a max of 99 measures, and you cannot append (join) two patterns with different time signatures. The Swing function operates on either 8th or 16th notes with a variable delay, providing the amount of swing feel. A swing window can also be specified, which determines how many notes relative to the swing note are affected. Reframe is for offsetting the start of a pattern and is specified in number of clocks. Another useful feature that helps to eliminate a lot of button pushing is Temp Assign, which puts the last sound played on all the key pads, and is handy for monitoring a sound you are editing. The Instrument List function shows you the names of the instruments in the current pattern. If you are playing a pattern, but can't remember where a certain sound is, just find its name from the instrument list, Temp Assign it to the pads and edit away.

STEPS AHEAD

The step recording mode is fairly powerful, and consists of three displays. The basic display shows the pattern the measure number, and the zoom level. Zoom level enables you to scale the display between 8th notes or high resolution. The record display shows 1/4-note timing, and bar lines are shown at the top of the display with note data at the bottom. A note is shown by a vertical bar, and an empty beat as a dot. Rewind and forward keys enable you to scroll through the pattern. The editing screen enables you to adjust the parameters recorded for each sound (Pitch, Decay, Nuance etc.)

To record in step mode you first select a sound by hitting a pad. Then select Record mode, and hit play. The selected sound is available on all the pads; if 16th notes are selected, each pad represents a 16th note. So to enter something on beats one and two of a 4/4 bar, you would hit pads 1 and 13. You can erase notes by selecting each one with the backward/forward keys, and setting the data slider to zero. Alternatively, just hold down the erase key and select the step you want to erase. Although you are working in step time mode the pattern is actually playing round as you record each drum. At first you want to hit a pad at the correct beat, but you do not have to because of the method of note entry. When you get used to this way of working, as found on Roland beat boxes as early as the TR606, it is much quicker than most forms of step programming.

ADDING FEEL

Now we come to one of the ways to put some life into your patterns. The Feel function adds accents to each beat, to a degree defined by three parameters: Type, Variation and Depth. Type selects 4, 8, 12 or 16 beats for the feel function to work on. Variation seems to control the way in which the accents occur, and Depth determines the range of velocities used. The operation of this function depends very much on the type of rhythm you have programmed in. Even with a high setting, the result may be fairly subtle, so some experimentation is required.

EXPERT MODE

This is where things get really interesting, and I spent a long time playing with this mode of operation. It is best to master the normal song/pattern functions before you go diving into Expert mode, which should give you a better grip of how it works, although it is not really too complicated. The expert mode is essentially an automatic composer that can construct patterns or songs in a given style. There are 17 styles available including rock, jazz, samba etc, plus some modern additions such as house/rap and dance. (What — no manic hardcore setting?!) If you turn up your nose at preset styles of any kind, rest easy; these are much better than the standard cheap preset keyboard rhythms, so enjoy. Each style has basic, fill-in, intro, and ending variations, and you can generate patterns from one to four bars in length. A variation factor of 1 to 8 can be set to introduce some changes to the pattern, 'humanising' the pattern as it repeats. Creating your pattern is just a question of choosing a style, and adjusting the parameters to suit. This requires a little experiment, to see how much each parameter varies your pattern. The results I obtained were certainly quite usable. When you create a pattern model it stays in a temporary area of memory, and if you like it you can transfer it to a regular pattern. If not you can keep regenerating until it suits. The user guide gives a good little tutorial on how this works.

GOING FOR A SONG

Creating a song in Expert mode, which unfortunately neither manual explains too clearly, is achieved as follows. You can make up to eight pattern models, each with a maximum of 32 measures. You then construct the song from a maximum of 16 parts, where each part corresponds to one of the pattern models. For example you could create four pattern models, (A to D) each four bars long. These could then be chained A, B, A, C, A, B, A, D. This then gives you a song 32 bars long, divided into eight parts. Intros, endings, and fill-ins can also be specified, and will be automatically placed at the appropriate points.

SYNCING IT ALL UP

There are four methods of synchronisation available: internal (of course); MIDI sync (timing is derived from MIDI clocks sent to the unit); MIDI auto (internal tempo is used until a MIDI start or continue message is received); intelligent tape sync. 'Intelligent' means that the R70 can sync correctly to any point on the tape, once it has been properly striped with the machine's 'smart FSK' signal.

MUCH ADO ABOUT MIDI

The MIDI implementation of the R70 is fairly extensive, and a high degree of control is afforded. MIDI operation is divided up into two sections, Instrument or Performance. Instrument mode allows you to assign a sound to each note of your MIDI keyboard, and play accordingly. Two Instruments can be set up, each one on its own MIDI channel. The Performance mode lets you assign a single sound across the keyboard (a bass sound would be an obvious choice, but it could be anything you like). Four different Performances can be set up, each on its own MIDI channel. Pitch, Decay, Nuance, and Pan can be assigned to track the keyboard — for example, the decay of a sound can become shorter as you play higher notes. Effectively what you have is a 6-part multi-timbral unit, with four tuned and two drum parts. Polyphony runs to 14 notes. Pitch, Decay, Nuance and Pan parameters can be set to respond to general purpose controllers, if required. These values can also be transmitted from the R70, handy when working with an external sequencer. You can also decide whether or not to transmit and receive program change, note off velocity, release, volume, pan, expression, and pitch bend for all Instruments and Performances.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The R70 is a good sounding, easy to use machine, with plenty of usable features. The built-in effects are an added bonus, and I think most people will find the expert mode a useful time saver. Perhaps a PCM sound card slot would be a bonus, but it would increase the cost a little. I'll just have to wait for the R700, I suppose...

Further information

Roland R70 £499 inc VAT

Roland UK, (Contact Details).