The drum machine with one foot in the past makes a welcome return to the future. Roland Schmidt shows the CR-78 a glimpse of 2024
Once upon a time, Roland kick-started its business by producing drum machines, designed as add-ons to the music tech of the day: viewed as a ‘home organ’. While its early drum machines adopted the familiar TR moniker, 1978 saw a break with this tradition, through the development of the first drum machine to use a Microprocessor. This was the era of ‘CompuRhythm’, and so the CR-78 was born.
Housed in a wooden box, the CR-78 was a revelation, albeit with very basic programmability. Equipped with rhythmic favourites such as Slow Rock and Bossanova, this didn’t stop it from becoming a hit with significant artists of the day, such as Blondie, Phil Collins and Ultravox.
Domestic chores
Fastforward to today, and the CR-78 still garners an enviable reputation, in no small part due to its passing resemblance to the legendary TR-808. This has undoubtedly triggered Cherry Audio’s desire to rekindle this classic in software, and it hasn’t disappointed us. As with many of its recent releases, the graphical interface provides depth and shading that adopts a threedimensional image of the machine on screen. It’s a thing of beauty to look at, but it is even more impressive to hear. All of the sounds are modelled rather than sampled, and while we did not have an original machine to compare it to, we do have many samples. The modelled sounds provide something as close to analogue as we could hope for in the computer-based domain. Could you tell them apart from an original machine? Probably not, given that all the original machines will be knocking on in years now, so any number of originals would sound different to each other. Consequently, Cherry have adopted a stance which gives us the best of everything.
While the original sounds are incredibly exacting, there is enormous scope to change things up
In the snare tonight
Upon loading, you simply cannot resist choosing one of the original preprogrammed drum patterns, and hitting the large start/stop button. Much of what you will hear sounds incredibly familiar. These patterns have been well exploited by bands and artists in the past, but things have firmly moved on. A quick flick to User mode (within the programmer section) and a familiar XoX-style programmer appears, allowing the assignment of your own beats in a pattern formation. You can select 16 or 24 steps, for duplet or triplet rhythms, or use the Swing function to delay the second duplet by an≈increasing amount. You can also create entire song forms within the plugin itself to run alongside your DAW.
Sounds of glass
While the original sounds are incredibly exacting, there is enormous scope to change things up. A second page labelled Voice Edit allows access to the settings of each sound. From here
