BOSS DR110

This was Roland's last analogue drum machine and both sound-wise and circuitry-wise it is very very similar to the Roland TR-606. You get 6 analogue sounds - kick, snare, open hat, closed hat, cymbal and clap, with accent controls, a balance (EQ / tone) knob, and trigger out. BUT and its a big BUT, the huge advantage the DR110 has over the TR606 is the LCD grid programming and 8 banks of 8 patterns. So why, we hear you ask, would anyone spend over £200 on a TR606 when a Boss DR-110 can be picked up for around £40? The only answer we can come up with is the the sight of the words 'Roland' and 'Analogue' in the same sentence causes temporary insanity in some people which makes them part with vast amounts of cash for what is essentially a piece of crap.

Anyway, enough of that rant for today :)

As you can see we've added a whole new smorgasbord of knobbage on an extra box strapped onto the left hand side. The extra controls consist of:

Bass drum pitch knob
Bass drum decay knob
Bass drum 808 boing switch (fairly redundant after adding the decay knob but what can you do)
Snare noise decay knob
Snare pitch knob
Snare filter knob
Open hat decay knob
Hats pitch knob
Hats filter knob
Cymbal decay knob
Cymbal filter / pitch knob
Clap decay knob
Clap noise filter knob
Clap pitch knob

The controls for the Hats and Cymbal do tend to interact with each other a little because of some doubling up of the circuitry for the sounds but that just tends to lead to some more bizarre top end sounds.

The only disadvantage the DR110 has compared to the TR606 is that the 606 has DIN sync and the standard DR110 has no way of syncing it to other kit. Even if you do discover where to inject DIN sync into the circuit you then find that for some reason the DR110 runs on 12ppqn where as standard DIN sync runs at 24ppqn. We solved this simply by installing a DIN sync interface round the back of the mod box with a divide down circuit to stop the DR110 running at double speed. There's even a bright blue LED to show when the DIN sync is active.

Take a listen to the demo mp3's to hear what this machine sounds like now.