A Brief History of Roland Drum Synthesis 

With the launch of  the Roland TR-1000 I became more interested in something lurking in my TR-6S. 

The Roland TR-8S and TR-6S have a powerful FM Synthesis sound engine that brings a whole universe of sonic textures to the modern drum machine classic

https://articles.roland.com/roland-engineering-morph-fm-synthesis/

 

Machines & Synthesizers

The inclusion of the FM sound engine in their current TR drum machine line returns to an idea Roland had when first thinking about the TR-808 - the drum synthesizer.

In the mid-1970s drummers had been catered for by companies like Pollard, Simmons and Pearl with devices that would play synthesiser sounds when hitting the skins of specially adapted drums. These were analogue synthesizers which allowed the drummer to tweak various parameters to get all manner of sensible and silly sounds. In the era of space-disco and synth-pop this was a symbiotic relationship with technology driving new genres which then created demand for the technology.

Meanwhile Roland had been developing programmable drum machines, starting with the CR-78 (1978). Their drum machines had previously focussed on providing preset rhythms to accompany keyboard players, or anyone else for that matter. The programmable rhythm was just the next logical step.

By 1979 there were three forces driving the next stage of development for Roland. The increasing use of drum machines and electronic drums in pop music pointed to a need for combining synthesis of drum sounds with the programmability of the CR-78. The other was the onset of sampled drum sounds which Roger Linn was about to bring to the market at high-cost and great risk as a business proposition.

Therefore, because Roland is a synthesizer maker, I suggested that we should go for developing a drum synthesizer with each instrument having its own synthesizer that allows you to create the sounds of your taste, rather than just realistic sounds. Kakehashi-san agreed with this idea. Tadao Kikumoto

https://rc-808.com/episodes-of-the-mid-o-series/

 

Although the TR-808 was originally conceived as a drum synthesizer, as the costs and time issues mounted they scaled back their ambitions to cover just a few sound sculpting options. In the end the range of control was about right for what was a set of artificial versions of real drums. It became a drum machine with knobs on.

The biggest problem was that deploying numerous potentiometers to allows users to synthesize sounds will consume so much space on circuit boards that we will quickly run out of rooms to place electronic components that comprise the electronic circuitries. This greatly forced us to lose the freedom on designing the product. Tadao Kikumoto

https://rc-808.com/episodes-of-the-mid-o-series/

 

The ersatz drum kit sound of the 808 was ultimately undermined by the high-end Linn LM-1 and the history of the machine would be written that the rock and pop professionals of the 1981 music scene voted for realism. It did succeed in other ways though. It was, counter to some prevailing theories, adopted very quickly by the electronic music scene to boost the electronic pop/funk/hip-hop (AKA electro) genres. Some people were crying out for a practical way to achieve what the likes of Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestras were doing with talented live drummers hooked up to electronic gear.

It must be noted that Kraftwerk had since the mid-seventies been playing the sounds of organist’s drum machines by hand and the sounds within were not far from the circuits later employed in the TR-808 (bridged-T resonant types). Grandmaster Flash was captured jamming live on his Vox Rhythm King in 1979, one of the same machines Kraftwerk used. He says he was doing this from the mid-seventies though! The TR-808 made this kind of sound accessible (at last) to a whole host of people. Not everyone wanted a real drummer sound.

The TR-909 still leant on core analogue voices to support the costly memory-based samples and offered similarly limited control over the circuits within. It had a bigger sound and was a worthy albeit unsuccessful follow-up to the TR808.  The march to digital was on by 1983 though and the analogue synthesis of sounds was becoming, ironically, less economically viable as digital prices dropped. Roger Linn's gamble had paid off. By the end of the decade the Roland R-5/R-8 had done away with the (T)transistors and the tactile controls of knobs and sliders. PCM samples could be twisted out of shape, but the idea of synthesizing drum sounds was essentially lost to time by the 90s. Roland were looking ahead and putting the commercial failures of the early eighties drum machines in the past.

As the years rolled on computer-based music-making peaked and hardware made a comeback. Drum machines, by now venerated and beloved by a new generation raised on electro, house and techno, - especially the Roland middle-0 series - were part of that revival.  Boutique companies like Elektron and Sonic Potions as well as bigger players like Korg and Nord offered various options for synthesizing drums too. Modular synthesis came back, smaller and yet bigger than before, and suddenly anything was possible in hardware as well as software. 

Meanwhile Roland were getting round to the next chapter of their drum machine story.

In 2014, thirty years after the 909 went out of production, the TR-8 was launched. This brough ACB to the market and was a logical next step into the future whilst respecting the legacy of the analogue era. Another four years and the TR-8 begat the TR8S and later 6S. The ‘S’ was the ability to load your own samples.

 

The Amazing Adventures of Morph

In August 2020 version 2.0 of the TR-8S firmware added a different kind of S. Synthesis. Limited synthesis, and from the other great nemesis of analogue synthesizers – FM. 

The Roland TR-8S v2.0 Update adds a powerful FM sound engine that brings a whole universe of sonic textures to the modern drum machine classic. Unlock the power of FM with the new MORPH feature—an ultra-expressive macro control that lets you sweep through an array of tonal variations, wildly manipulating FM depth, ratio, and feedback…all with a simple twist of a knob.

https://rolandcorp.com.au/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-tr-8s-rhythm-performer

Synthesis was back in the Roland machines in the same limited way it had managed to find its way on to the TR-808. These FM instruments in the TR-XS machines had one control. For all the power and depth in the sound engine it was reduced to a single word: morph.

We wanted our users to have a more accessible experience of FM sound. FM synthesis is generally difficult to control without understanding its structure. Kazuhiro Kubo

The idea was very good. Adjust a set of parameters with one control and take the brainwork out of FM.

https://articles.roland.com/ultimate-guide-fm-synthesis/

More important was that your now had access to synthesis inside a drum machine. There is some irony to it being FM after the might Yamaha DX-7 had cut a swathe through competitors’ analogue synths in the 1980s. It was a basic kind of ‘color’ parameter seen elsewhere on Roland Aira gear that didn’t always even explain what it was doing. The diagram above is the only example of a look inside of what was going on. 

This was a reasonable approach to what was just a drum machine, and many praised this addition which also came on version 1.0 of the TR-6S. The ACB sound engine was more or less limited to the kinds of sound design possible on the 808 and 909, but that is another story.

Roland weren’t done yet though.