This is the third version of this article, and I have become more critical. I’m using a poo as a half toilet roll.
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.
A single USB cable is all you need to wire the MC-707 to your 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 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. If I was serious and had the space I would use a Fantom. I hoped the 707 would become my latest little treasure box of funny noises – following on my Fantom XR and KORG wavestate. But I’m not now sure of that.
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.
The MPC has a much larger screen with touch controls and simple synthesis and effects designed for easy performance with your fingers. It comes from bashing data in with your fists and has streamlined that process. The MC-707 has come from drum machines with 16 lights that tick along a sequence. You absolutely can bash data in with your fists but my initial impression is that’s not the heart of it.
The AKAI has a shitload of sample storage – mine has a 256GB SSD installed. You can carry a whole lot of music around and it can replay large swaths of it. The whole gig. The Roland has much less storage and very limited amounts of RAM for sample playback. Samples are small phrases whereas the AKAI can play back entire songs. 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 good reason to claim doing it earlier than anyone else, but you do become more sophisticated in your expectations over time. The 2022 version of me asks – can you remember doing long division? Before calculators? You have to relearn this kind of working and be satisfied with a comparatively skeletal version of music.