Syncing 2 vintage Roland drummachines, CR-78 and CR-8000

Published on May 29, 2019 obscure wave music

"Syncing 2 vintage Roland drum machines.

Here's a little demo -really nothing fancy - featuring the Roland CR-8000 and the CR-78 synced together and plugged into, but not recorded on, a vintage Tascam 244. The echo is the now-almost-vintage Boss RE-20.
Both these drummachines are long-time favorites of mine, along with the TR-606.

The point here is this: though both drum machines respond to Roland sync, the CR-8000 uses 24 ppqn and the CR-78 uses 12 ppqn. Wich means that if you just plug sync out from the CR-8000 into the CR-78, the latter one will play at double the tempo, which can be intresting, but most of the time is not.

So, I worked around that problem by using a Doepfer MSY-1 to sync the CR-78 from a midi clock coming from a DSI mono evolver keyboard ( which plays the “ drony “ sequence in the background from it's internal sequencer ). The MSY-1, although a relatively old device, can be set to different clock divisions from an incoming midi clock. Using the same midi clock source, the CR-8000 is synced by the sync24 converter inside the Novation Drumstation ( both the MSY-1 and the Drumstation are out of view ).

Using this principle, I'll try to make another demo with an 808 and 606 added to the setup.

Recorded straight from the 244's line out into a Roland R-05. I chose not to record on the 244, because it is still in the process of being refurbished and the tape mechanism is not up to the job yet.

By the way: my 244 misses the button cap of the cassette eject switch. Would anyone know where I can find a replacement ? All the transport caps/buttons on the 244 are one “ pad of caps/buttons “, and the one for eject here has broken of and vanished... Any help or suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks for watching !"