Updated 11 Sept 2024 with new information about a third party editor.
This is the fourth version of this article, and I have become more critical.
I recently decided to sell my MC-202 micro-composer and use the money to buy a second hand MC-707. That’s a profit of 505 MC’s! Although I can hear the gnashing of readers’ analogue teeth I was never ever going back to two channels of control voltage. Rather than shelve an old trophy I’d rather have a functioning micro-composer, even if it’s now called a ‘groovebox’ (why not GB-707?)
I’m not going to re-iterate all the usual stuff you can find in normal reviews. You can find that elsewhere.
Open the box and there’s the AIRA logo. Wait what? AIRA was once about high level ACB emulation of circuits – this guy is a Zencore ROMpler. Marketing.
Some of you might laugh at an old man playing a ‘groovebox’. I’ll remind you that I was running a TB-303 BassLine / MC-202 MicroComposer / TR-808 Rhythm Composer combo well before ‘acid house’, ‘EDM’ and all that tat. Tracks like my The East Is Red are the prototype of all the dance music that came after and a ‘groovebox’ is simply the codification of artists like me. So get off my lawn.
A quick fluff around and the familiar flow comes evident – not so much like the micro-composers of old as the drum machines of the 1980’s – 8 channels of TR-808 or 909 style pattern sequencing. I was quickly able to make ditties a bit like 1982 – repetitive bits that can be tweaked, holes added, faded in and out and so on. (These boxes inspired Ableton Live – although the belief these days is the reverse.) You will want to move this to your DAW to make improvements.
I already own an AKAI MPC Live which I’ve used as a sampler and sequencer on tour. I can verfiy that the MPC is a DAW – you can dig down to the individual notes in a phrase. The 707 is not a DAW – there’s no way to move notes around and tidy up your phrases.
A single USB cable is all you need to wire the MC-707 to your real DAW – I like this very much after years of tangled MIDI cables. You can use it as your main stereo audio interface, with live effects included. If you already have a sound interface you’ll likely want to run some audio cables, but I was able to choose the generic ASIO driver in Nuendo and set up two interfaces. There was no problem with choosing USB ports on my PC (unlike many other USB connections). I was very quickly able to record 8 stereo sound channels fed into REAPER and play my master MIDI keyboard out to the 707. It’s about as elegant as any hardware sound source can get.
In the past (as with the Integra for example) there would be a software editor you could use. Not here – you must design your own sounds first on a Zenology Pro software instrument, save them as an entire bank of patches and transfer that bank via the SD card on the 707. This sucks, but I guess you then build a master library that you can use on any future Roland Zencore machine.
Do I need to mention that Zenology Pro is an additional cost? Balls. Of course any audio samples will have to be added into the patch at the last moment so even with the software some further editing on the 707 is inevitable.
Editing a sound on the unit is not completely awful but it’s tedious. Four knobs get you quickly around the ‘simple interface’ and the ‘advanced interface’ is awful on any version of Zencore. If you dedicated yourself you could get good at it, but I doubt you would ever quite grasp all the elements of the Zen.
Why even bother with the hardware? A major reason for me trying the 707 is that Zenology Pro doesn’t allow user samples – no Roland virtual instruments allow samples. My hardware XV-5080 allows samples – the XV-5080 does not. I really like mixing the texture of samples into my synthetic sounds and the 707 is the least expensive current Roland hardware to do this. But I don’t see that I would often use the Roland live, and in the studio I would probably end up using software so that I didn’t have to program through those little knobs. It’s not quite there for me.
Like I said I’ve been doing this groovebox thing for a long while. I’ve some reason to claim doing it earlier than anyone else, but you do become more sophisticated in your expectations over time. The 2024 version of me asks – can you remember doing long division? Before calculators? Why relearn this kind of working and be satisfied with a comparatively skeletal version of music?
Update on the new editor.
A newly developed software editor for the MC707 offers some hope for this device, which is otherwise inscrutable as a musical instrument. Sure you can sequence the built in patches and modifications but crafting new sounds on the hardware is a punishment. There’s just four knobs with multiple shifts that only allow some pinhole surgery on your sounds, which must previously be brought in en masse on a data stick. Clunky.
Maestro Benis67 has spent considerable time deciphering the 707’s system exclusive codes – which apparently are a clusterfuck, spewing out wrong data. Maybe Roland only got halfway through designing the software before deciding to offer Zenology Pro instead. Which is a shame as the 707 is the only affordable Roland device that can include audio samples (I know that the Fantom is intended here but I don’t have the space or bank account).
The software is complex, because Zenology is complex. It took quite a while for me to understand the workflow for tracks and clips and tones and dinosaurs but eventually I got the box to talk to the editor software in real time with some good results. His editor is not as pretty as the Zenology Pro software but includes controls for all the features as well as a more standard computer based library. It’s really not that different to Roland’s software for the Integra-7.
Here’s the rub. You can remotely edit patches on the MC707, but then again you could edit the patches faster in Zenology Pro and then copy them to the box. Either way you have to prepare a library of samples before you get busy with the editing. Once at that point, yes the editor would be a great help in making the final adjustments to include the samples.
While I’m happy with what Benis67 has achieved it remains odd to make sounds on hardware that are exactly the same as software. This release makes the 707 less silly – but it’s still silly. Transferring samples with the editor would be excellent.
Alternative – Korg’s WaveState. Even if you keep clear of the complexity of wave sequencing you can have samples and traditional oscillators working in tandem. And you can run it as software or hardware as you need. Samples are included in the patch. Roland – heed this.