After a week of sitting in my make-shift studio, I finally got some time to play around with the Roland TR-8 I picked up. Wow, what a machine. It totally to me to my late-80s/early-90s techno roots. What a phat beat pumpin’ beast.
Forget the basic Roland TR-808/TR-909 sounds it emulates, add the scatter functionality and you’ve got a beast that doesn’t just drum for you. If you’re not a strong beats guy like me, and you get stumped, the scatter functionality can help create breakbeats and fills to way more than satisfy my beat needs. Tie in, not just the audio over USB, but throw in the midi data and you can create some out of the world beats with your DAW drum set (Reason, Logic, etc…)