 Hello, my name is Trent Wolby. I have been a drum machine addict for 16 years and I have zero days sober and I am kind of freaking out right now and this is The Verge. In 1980, the Japanese electronics company Roland released the TR-808 rhythm composer. For a long time, people thought the only way to make dance music was with this machine. The noises that came from the analog circuitry inside made people go insane on the dance floor. But Roland stopped making the 808 after just a few years in the mid 80s. You can buy one on eBay now for around three grand or use one of thousands of hardware or software imitators. They all work pretty good but they have been, you know, just copycats. Paper rings, wax figurines, humble odes to a classic until now. This is the TR-8, the first true spiritual successor to the TR-808 but it's all digital and it has something to say to all the haters. Roland developed a totally new modeling language called analog circuit behavior to faithfully recreate the big sounds of transistors and diodes that made the TR-808 so famous. I am sitting here listening to it with my own ears and I can tell you this is not some marketing BS. This is indistinguishable from that 1980 kick. Actually wait a second, I can tell the difference. This kick sounds better than the original. Yeah, I said it and this one only cost 500 bucks. Eat it eBay. Thirty four years later, the company responsible for creating a generation of analog drum machine fetishists is killing off any reason to still be a fetishist. It's like when they remastered Seinfeld in HD. No one scoffed at the fidelity and bought a bunch of old VHS's in protest. To be real with you though, the kick drum wasn't the reason I became a drum machine addict. The funnest and most awesome part of using an old 808 is how simple it is to create beats with a 16-set sequencer. The TR-8 doesn't just sound like a champ, it's got this visceral, tactile experience with all the straightforwardness and get shit done mentality of its ancestor. But with a big old truckload of intuitive new control features that make it really fun to make music on. We took a short break to sit down with Brandon Ryan from Roland to talk about workflow. It's amazing to see people actually say, wow, there's no LED screen, how great that is. There was a time when of course everybody wanted a screen on everything. Computers are great for, that's the primary place people are making music is in computers. But there is a certain level of non-immediacy, a lack of immediacy when you're going and using these. Everything you kind of have to think about. If you want to add a step or glitch something, a lot of times it's a process you have to go through. In that amount of time, an idea can become lost or it could become just not worth the effort or you might not try it or experiment. Having one to one knobs, a knob that always does one thing and just reaching up and being able to play things. Just different stuff comes out. I think almost anybody, no matter how into computers and plugins you are, you put them in front of something like this and they'll do things that they wouldn't do in a virtual representation. Let's go in and hear that classic TR-808 sound coming out of the TR-8. Kick drum right here. Snare drum right there. Bring in the toms. Rim shot. Hand clap. Closed hat. Open hat. Crash cymbal. And the ride. That's all I had to do to make a kind of sick beat. If I do say so myself. But that's not all Roland is updating to the 21st century. Meet the new era family. This is the TV-3, the VT-3 and the System 1. Spiritual successors to the TV-303 bass line machine, the VP-330 vocoder and the SH-101 synthesizer. They may not have been as famous as their 808 big brother but they are every bit as important in shaping the sound of electronic music. Listen up y'all. Since all this crazy software started coming out and when I say crazy software I really mean Ableton, it's been kind of hard for me. I mean how am I supposed to crank out epic dance jams on the same machine I use to watch porn and like do g-chat and spreadsheets on? I just love boxes, you know what I mean? They're my little buddies. They don't make me feel like I'm at a goddamn office trying to be productive. I mean you can't do your taxes on a Stratocaster and you shouldn't be able to do them on a damn drum machine either. As sick as that analog circuit behavior modeling may be or as heavy as the kick on the TR-8 sounds, Roland knows it really only needs to manufacture one thing to turn on an entire new generation of addicts. AC