Roland TR-606: WHY? Not that i would ever suggest that the words ‘Roland’, ‘Drum Machine’ and ‘Analogue’ in the same sentence would cause people to go temporarily insane but lets face it, the TR-606 is a piece of utter crap. If these things were valued on simple music making potential then you wouldn’t be able to shift a 606 for £20 but stick the word Roland on it, give it a case like a 303 and suddenly its worth £150. Put it this way, if someone described to you a drum machine with 6 cheap sounds that you can’t edit in any way, with one output, which is impossible to sync up without a DIN sync converter, with bugger all memory and with a really shit programming interface, and then offered to sell it to you for £150 you’d just laugh in their face. And yet this is exactly what people are buying when they get a 606. Get a sampler, sample the sounds and then fuck off with your cheap electro bollocks. Ever heard of a Boss DR-110? More or less exactly the same machine as a 606 but with more sounds and an LCD screen for grid programming, oh and its analogue. How much would one of these set you back? £20-£30 maximum as it doesn’t say Roland on it.
It is an instant signifier from the 80's and fits well into any all-girl electrotrash outfit in between the Juno and the Polysix. The drum sounds make an excellent backing to occasional swearing and songs about pornography, whilst the silver catches the flash light from magazine photographers particularly well too. I tell you what, you haven't really lived (in shoreditch) untill owned one of these things.
I love electroclash/shoreditch/art school so much I have 'Roland Fag Whore' tattoed on my forehead in letraset
Seriously though, I tend to agree that the 606 nothing but a polished turd. Open it up and instead of circuitry it is just full of banana skins and household waste, or so I have been told.
Open it up and instead of circuitry it is just full of banana skins and household waste, or so I have been told.
Weirdly you are not that far off. As i understand it the 303 and 606 circuitboards are made from compressed cardboard or some kind of crappy wood substitute which was used at the time for making prototype boards and should never have been used for a final instrument run as they just fall apart.
Author
Logged
