Roland CompuRhythm CR-78 Demo

Brief demo of some of the features on the Roland CR-78 drum machine. Mostly playing around with rhythm selections (incl. A/B variations), voice cancel, tempo, automatic fills, automatic fading, etc. And of course no CR-78 demo would be complete without playing "In the Air Tonight" and some Hall & Oates ("Kiss On My List"). The former uses the "Disco-2" rhythm with snare cancelled out; the latter uses "Rock-1" with automatic fill 7.

On a side note, I haven't found any permutation of rhythms to give the exact bass drum pattern on "In the Air Tonight". Maybe this is how Phil did it as well, but I just used the programming interface to make a custom rhythm with this bass drum pattern. Then I load this at the same time as "Disco-2" (these are the two yellow buttons pressed in the demo).

Category:

Music

Tags:

• roland
• cr78
• cr-78
• compurhythm
• analog
• drum
• machine
• phil
• collins
• air
• tonight
• hall
• oates
• kiss
• list

[mrduckbutt]

FYI - I had wondered about those extra bass drum beats on the 'In the Air Tonight' pattern. I guess Phil did program those on top of the Disco-2 beat like I had to do for this video .. here's his quote: "'In the Air Tonight' was just a drum machine pattern that I took off that CR78 drum machine. You could eliminate certain sounds and program bass drums and snare drums, so I programmed a bass drum part into it, but basically the rest of it was already on there."

[Obelisk2290]

does it have multiple outs?

[mrduckbutt]

@Obelisk2290 - It has high/low impedance main output, plus a trigger output (no separate voice outputs or anything)

[senorverde09]

Heart of Glass at the beginning?

[mrduckbutt]

@senorverde09 - I've always seen Heart of Glass listed as a CR-78 tune, and the beguine/rhumba rhythms are nearly identical (rhumba is what you hear at the beginning, and you hear both around 2:28). I could never get it to sound identical though, even mixing with other presets. Maybe they added some programmed bits in there with it?

[senorverde09]

@mrduckbutt Well, it's worth a shot. I think everything you did was pretty dang close to the orignal in my opinion (in the air tonight seems tricky). Can you try H&O's 'I can't go for that' on that thing? I watched a live at daryl's episode (episode 10) where he mentioned that no can do was made with a 78 using rock and roll one pattern. Check it out if you haven't. Good luck!

[mrduckbutt]

@senorverde09 - That's right, 'I Can't Go For That' uses the B-variation of the Rock-1 preset (you can hear it briefly at 2:58, that double-snare beat).

[gmaildotcom]

00:00-00:09 : Heart of Glass

[Luraka1978]

also 'In The Air Tonight' by Phil Collins.

[DoReMiForever]

808 and 909 and 626 are better.

[900GTi]

Used on OMD's Enola Gay and John Foxx's Underpass

[LouiePlaysDrums]

Hall and Oates - Kiss On My List at 0:58-1:10

[Ni5ei]

Those Volume and Balance buttons aren't the original ones. Contact me if you're interested in some new old stock.

[eatmyvcr]

I bought a CR-78 a few months ago and found that Daryl Hall used the Rock-1 AND Disco-2 presets for the "I Can't Go For That" beat. FYI: Apple has a nice little app for the iPod touch and iPad called "Funk Box" that very closely mimics the Cr78, TR-808s and other drum kits. Very cool app but nothing beats the original!

[TypewriterMcRevenue]

Reminds me of "Dreaming of me" by DM... Vince Clarke is good people.

[ihasch]

Heart of Glass was based on the CR-78. You hear it distinctly in the intro and in the trigger pulses that the CR-78 sent through the synthesizers. HOG, recorded in June, 1978, was an early use of this technology.

[Godscarmachine]

Hear a ton of drum beats that were used in Metamatic, and Telekon.