TR8s

"Born of the most famous and influential drum machines ever made, the TR-8S combines the best of its Roland heritage with modern production techniques and comprehensive sound design. The result? The most complete drum machine to date—a forward-thinking, performance-tuned instrument unlike any other. Build your dream kit from the most iconic drum sounds of all time, otherworldly FM sounds, and the finest selection of samples from our vast library—or go even further by importing your own custom samples. Tap, tune, and tweak with hands-on controls and production tools that make your patterns move and groove. And why keep this kind of percussive power confined to the studio? The TR-8S was literally made to play live."

The TR8s is one of the main Live instruments used by EMC23 portable and powerful it allows us perfomrm a set with as little gear as we choose depending on location, logisitcs etc and represents the ideal piece of Studio Technology that we use for composition

https://www.roland.com/global/products/tr-8s/

Editor

• Standalone graphical editor and librarian for the TR-8S and TR-6S
• Available for macOS and Windows
• Librarian function for managing patterns and kits
• Onscreen motion editing
• Undo and redo for quick revisions
• Rename patches, kits, and projects quickly from your computer keyboard
• FX tab for accessing all INST and MFX paramete

Filing System and naming Convention

The EMC23 naming convention is as follows:

ref Title Revision_tempo_key
001 Found Sounds 001_x_x
001 Found Sounds 002_100_x
002 Amsterdamned 001_100_C_Minor

For non tempoed and non scaled packs an x is substituted.

When samples have been deleted from the TR8s memory, the instrument does not retain its name on the LCD so it’s impossible to determine what sample is missing. The sample name is replaced with a ? The TREditor does retain this info.

When the sample is reimported, it’s included in the kit again. When other samples have been imported, missing samples might get replaced with those samples (I NEED TO DOUBLE CHECK THIS - I get the impression this has something to do with sample import order, as if there are sample slots the kits point to, instead of individual samples)

There’s “Sample Category” on the TR8s which we might leverage better (I think instead of “User” we would have “Noise”, “Birds”, “EMC Hits” etc. I NEED TO CHECK THIS. I think it’s akin to the existing categories like “Kick”, “Snare”, “Bass” etc.

There is a sample optimization option on the hardware. After importing, and deleting and replacing samples from the SD, you might see something like: FREE 85% OPTIMIZE 41% Running the optimization seems to reset the FREE space to 100% (when relevant)

Estimated 20mb memory Max 400 samples (includes factory samples) *In my experience, I can load approx 20 custom samples (of varying filesize/length) Max 180 seconds long per sample

How to manage samples I’m still not sure about this. The LCD has limited space so shorter file names are best, especially when incrementing Eg. low-metallic-hit-01.wav displays as [low-metallic-hit] on the LCD so the fact that I have 01-13 will be problematic. As I scroll through them all I will see is [low-metallic-hit] 13 times.

We have zoom recording folders named by date 2021-10-24-name-location and so far I’ve been using the same naming for the sample I create from the source audio Eg. 2021-10-24-name-location-description-01.wav But this is no good on the TR8s I suggest folder names remain descriptive and then we rename the samples meant for the TR8s (maybe as copies) with an abbreviation of some sort so low-metallic-hit-01.wav could be lmh-01.wav Provided they remain in the same folders in Dropbox as on the SD card, we should be able to retain the association if we ever have to make adjustments

Since the TR8s also has a max number of samples and memory, I was contemplating limiting the total folder size to under 20mb each, so we could easily swap out entire sample sets. To swap out a set, we have to delete existing custom samples from the memory and import others from the SD card (this can’t be done when the TR8s is playing). This gets hard to keep track of. With more experience using the TREditor, we might find some of these issues are better managed there. And/or maybe we can avail of the backup feature (entire kits) more usefully.

The baza.run kits have a character limit for the filename too (same issue with the low-metallic-hit-001.wav gets cut off before the 001). Baza lets us rename the sample when we upload it which is handy for LCD but difficult to track the sample to the original one stored in Dropbox.

Tempo Loops

The TR8 does not have audio strectching and was not built for loops , Of course if the bpm is known before hand, as it is with all our sets, then one can build templates for specific tempi.