Roland TR-77 voiceboard in 19" with midi trigger interface

Stereoping
Published on Aug 15, 2017

"More or less entertaining demo- and testsong with slideshow for a project in summer 2017: putting the voiceboard of a broken Roland TR-77 drumbox into a new 19" housing and supplying a midi trigger interface to overcome the boring preset rhythms. The board offers 13 pure analogue sounds, mainly generated with big coils in stunningly simple schematics: Bassdrum, Snaredrum, Hihat, Cymbal, Maracas, Tambourine, Low Conga, Low & High Bongo, Rimshot, Cowbell, Clave and Guiro. Guiro is more kind of sound effect producing a permanent chirping sound in 2 different frequencies. It's fully supported by the interface: 2 different midinotes switch Guiro on/off and high/low.

I also found a very simple way to misuse the onboard VCA for an accent feature. The VCA normally mutes the TR-77 output when stopped to prevent getting all the noises from the clockgenerators to the output. (The Accent feature is just explained, not demoed in the video.)

All drumsounds in the song come from the miditriggered TR-77 voiceboard running through a TAPCO 4400 stereo spring reverb. Further equipment: Juno 6 + Line6 Echopark, Korg Polysix + Roland DEP5, Kawai K4 and - at the end of the vid - a lovely diletantic live synth solo on the minikorg-700 through the realtime tweaked Sparta Delay.

The beginning of the song is quite cheesy but stay tuned, around 3:20 it turnes into a nice 80ies style. Hope you like it :-) Wanne see more midified drumboxes? Then please drop a comment. I still got many of them flying around, waiting to be brought back to studiolife by getting some midi-trigger support.

I also wrote an article about this project on my site: https://www.stereoping.com/tr-77-info..."