Synth Site |  Roland |  TR-626

Various points - 1. NO VELOCITY SENSITIVE PADS!! (Arrghhh) 2. Terribly limited sequencer but then I guess we all use our PCs now.. on the other hand it does have a kind of rustic charm about it - can be fun to assign it to control a bass synth and then play about with 4-bar loops - helps to give you new ideas. 3. Surprisingly good MIDI implementation. 4. Really excellent display compared to most drum boxes. 5. Sounds are tunable unlike (I think) its little brother the 525.

Sole good point - 10 (Count 'em) outs - wow! Shame you can't pick which sounds go to which outs really isn't it...But this does give you rather increased possibilites by running the sounds through external FX - there's life in the old dog yet!

For the money it's quite a cute toy and you never know it could be the next 303 if some bloke uses it on a dance smash!!!! (This is fairly unlikely!!) Also it is really well made with a groovy display which is much better than the HR16 and other 2x16 jobbies - this thing has a custom LCD designed for drum pattern editing.

Only buy one if you want to be different really - for only a tiny bit more cash you could get a HR16 or HR16B or any of the other 16-bit units any of which make this thing sound like a toy although it does score over them in the display, number of outs and cute quirkiness departments - you choose.

Sorry for inaccuracies - I sold mine a couple of years ago - and the bloke still owes me the cash...grumble grumble....