The drum machine is now a more important part of the modern studio than ever before. Roland's new baby seems set to capture the semi-pro end of this market.

In late 1984, Roland replaced the TR808 with the TR707 to create a new standard for studio drum machines. It had a useful selection of sampled percussion voices, plentiful programming and synchronisation facilities and a reasonably low price. The newly introduced TR505 fills the gap below the TR707 in the same way as the Drumatix did for the TR808, but in some ways it is a real advance on all these machines and at £225, looks certain to monopolise the market in budget units.

Modus Operandi

Those of you familiar with the TR909 and TR707 will recognise all the standard Roland programming features. Three programming modes are provided, two for writing patterns of up to 16 steps in either step-time or real-time (tap-time) and one for connecting patterns together to form a track. Up to 48 patterns can be programmed; another 48 are provided as presets, many of which can be quite useful. Without going into intricate details, the programming modes are just as comprehensive as on the larger machines so that if you must write tracks in alternate 13/8 and 7/4 time, you can. The Flam and Shuffle options provided by the TR707 are missing, but since these options simply represent fine time intervals, you can synthesise them with chains of 1/32 or 1/64 note patterns though this is not nearly so flexible and is wasteful of memory. Up to six tracks, totalling 423 measures can be composed before the TR505 runs out of memory. All this data can be saved to cassette in about 40 seconds, but there is no RAM cartridge facility. For professional and live use, this may seem awkward but I'm not sure that a 40 second gap every six songs is such an imposition and in the home studio, this minor inconvenience can be virtually ignored. Saving data reliably on cassettes is also not as difficult as many people think; all you need is a half-decent cassette deck with clean heads. Most people get unstuck when they using different machines (with differently aligned tape heads) for saving and loading so the word is, use the same cassette deck all the time and keep it clean.

Anyway, to return to the device, ex-TR707 programmers will see the biggest difference in the display format. Apart from a single tempo LED, all the information is presented on a single multi-function LCD display. Only one instrument rhythm pattern is displayed at one time, in contrast to the TR707's 16x10 matrix, but great quantities of track, pattern, tempo and MIDI information are also shown. The LEDs had to go since the TR505 is battery-powered (by six AA cells) although a socket is provided for powering from a 9v adaptor (which must be fully regulated to prevent hum). In common with its parent, a pale beige injection moulding houses the electronics. Slightly less than half the size of the TR707 but not very much lighter, the TR505 feels less flimsy but nevertheless would not respond well to mishandling or dropping. The main keys are hard plastic which should stand up to normal usage without any problems. However, it's easy to get carried away playing additional percussion manually, so only time will tell how they stand up to that!

For...

Of course the purpose of all this is to get your drum track playing, so what are the sounds like? In a word, wonderful. 16 are provided (against ten in the TR707) and they are of uniformly high quality. The lower row of eight main keys represents a basic kit and includes three toms and a rimshot (which is in fact a rim click). The upper row contains ride and crash cymbals, high and low congas, high and low cowbells, handclaps and a timbale. Accent can be applied to all the instruments and there are six levels of Accent. In practice, this resolution is quite adequate.

"I would suggest that where compromises must be made, the snare and bass drums should still be given separate outputs."

...and Against

The chief cost-cutting exercise and the biggest handicap of the TR505 lies in the voice output system. There are no separate voice outputs, just one pair of jacks presenting a preset panned output and a stereo headphone socket. Looking at the circuit diagram reveals that separate outputs could be fitted for the most critical components, namely bass and snare, but doing so would naturally invalidate the warranty if you did it yourself and I'm not sure how much spare room there is inside the case to accommodate this mod. The circuit also shows why there is a slight but noticeable drift in programmed tempo, a characteristic shared with the TR707. The clock oscillator is a very simple two-inverter type which is influenced to some extent by temperature and supply voltage variations. Normally this will go unnoticed, but where absolutely perfect timing is essential, it can be arranged by using external synchronisers. This brings us to the question of interfacing facilities.

Interfacing

Roland have confirmed their commitment to MIDI with this unit; you can only interface using MIDI but the facilities provided are very comprehensive. All instruments can be assigned to any note number, transmit and receive channels and master or slave status can be set, and full track information (track select, current position, start/stop and clock) received and transmitted. All MIDI parameters can be accessed with one key and modified with up/down keys. The only remaining socket on the back panel is for a start/stop footswitch.

All these facilities work well but why have they not fitted a tape sync facility? Please! The point is that it would cost virtually nothing in hardware terms because all the necessary bits already exist for saving programs. For me, the main relevance of tape sync is not just to add extra instruments (although this would go some way to offsetting the loss of separate outputs) but to free you from the restriction of having to compose a complete drum arrangement before recording starts. Of course you can get around this by buying Roland's SBX10 MIDI synchroniser but I don't really think that this should be considered a necessity.

In Use

Anyone who has mastered Roland's (or Clive Sinclair's) multifunction programming philosophy will feel pretty much at home with the operating system. Setting up a straightforward rhythm is most easily done in 'tap-time' using the inbuilt metronome, whilst accents and funny time signatures are better set up in step-time. It would be nice to be able to chain patterns whilst writing because the mental processes involved in writing long patterns can get a bit convoluted. There may be a way of doing this but the pre-production manual didn't drop any hints. As any pattern length and four different note length scales are available, details such as breaks, Latin extravaganzas and odd bars can be easily accommodated. A built-in demo program shows off the voices and programming facilities of the machine quite effectively and also means that the man in the shop doesn't have to be a whizz programmer in order to impress prospective customers.

Although sixteen voices are shown on the front panel, only eight can be sounded at any one time. This is due to the fact that there is only one tom sample, one cowbell sample and so forth. Different playback speeds are used for different pitches; open and closed hi-hats are different samples of course, but use the same D/A converter channel; and so on. In practice this is not a big restriction.

"At this price, even with what omissions it has, the TR505 is a real winner..."

As mentioned above, the sampled drum sounds are excellent. I consider most of them to equal or even improve on their TR707 counterparts. The snare and bass have that solid yet clear quality that needs no EQ. The toms sound hard, with a slight pitch drop, whilst the rim shot is true, if not bright enough for my ears. All the cymbals are amazingly realistic, particularly the ride, whilst the crash sample lasts a good two seconds and actually cuts off at just about the right moment.

As ever, Roland provide digital samples of analogue synthesised handclaps, much more acceptable than the real thing. Both congas and cowbells, though brief on headphones, are really beyond criticism when ensconced in a mix and should bring out all the budding Chepito Areas amongst you. Consider that the whole lot costs less than a single good quality conga!

Only one timbale is provided, which is a pity as I would have liked two. A slight crackling marred the timbale sample in the review machine, whilst quantisation noise, inevitable in 8-bit sampling, is noticeable when listening to tom and conga voices in isolation, but both effects were quite insignificant in context, ie. with reverb or in a mix with other instruments.

One Lo-Fi attribute that this product shares with most digital sound products is its limited bandwidth, in this case a bit more than 10kHz (25kHz sample rate). Although the cymbals do sound very good, they lack that airy quality that comes with good condenser mics and a professional PCM recorder. Of course the old psychoacoustic enhancer can help out here and now that Aphex are licensing out their process to other companies, it seems odd that more low bandwidth bits of gear don't have them built-in. It's a cheap and effective solution.

Conclusions

Not many manufacturers introduce a budget-range machine which exceeds its up-market competitors in as many areas as this one does. At this price, even with what omissions it has, the TR505 is a real winner and no 4-track studio owner looking for a drum machine can afford to overlook it. Larger studios will be frustrated purely by the lack of outputs and the lack of tape sync.

Aside from the lack of separate voice outputs, the omission of any conventional trigger outputs is sheer MIDI snobbery. For triggering samplers, the trigger pulse is still the most practical method and is less likely to cause delay problems than MIDI. I've a feeling that these omissions are not the result of a costing exercise but a marketing one. After all, with a just a few pound's worth of extra facilities, the TR505 would knock the TR707 into a cocked hat.

Further details are available from: Roland UK Ltd, (Contact Details).