RS008 Roland MC-303: The O.G. Groovebox

Описание: The MC-303 is a very personal affair for me. Other than most of the stuff on this channel, I’ve owned the machine in the video for close to 25 years.

Back in the 90s Techno ruled supreme, at least here in Frankfurt Germany, the birthplace of German Techno music (according to people from Frankfurt that is) there was no way to escape the call of the mighty bass drum. So as a kid getting into music, techno was the natural way to go for me and so many other bedroom producers of the day. To bad for me that Techno had already been around for quite some time in the late 90s, so all the cool gear had already become way too expensive for my 16 year old self back then. So when Roland announced the MC 303 I was stunned. It all just sounded too good to be true! 303 like in TB 303 (I had a poster of a tb303 on my bedroom wall back then). Multiple TR drumkits and lots of knobs (all the cool kids were fiddlin with knobs!) all in in one almost affordable package – I just had to have one!

Scraping together money form wherever I could, I actually managed to really get a MC 303 and boy was I disappointed when I got it. Getting used to the interface took quite a while because anything I had ever used before was a PC based (think Cakewalk and Cubase, ‘borrowed’ from friends) and no matter what I tried, the tracks never came out quite the way I would have liked them to. Having just invested everything into the machine, I kept on trying anyway, spending hundreds (if not more) hours at the machine, laying out the tracks you can hear in this video.

When revisiting the machine for this video project, I was amazed to find some of my old tracks not to sound too bad after all. Drums and basses are punchy, pads lush and the filters are much less terrible then I remember them, and even if you don’t dig the sounds, you’ll get a great performance oriented hardware sequencer for your other gear. So actually, in 2020, it’s still quite a nice machine that can be had for around 100€ these days, money that is very well spent I’d say!

Tracklist:

0:00 Introduction
1:34 136BMP Sweepin
3:48 120BPM Really Bad RMB
5:01 93BPM 808 Beat
6:06 136BPM That Pad
9:22 129BPM Rage
10:51 173BPM Really Bad DnB
11:16 142BPM 2Step
14:42 138BPM Trance
17:52 Conclusion
19:21 Chill Outro