I have a 90s MC303 that I picked up for $100 10 years ago. Been collecting dust for a long time already, do people really hate the groovebox series ? lol.

 

Rather loving it.
Stop the video to check the roland memes.ROFL but not as good as the meme thread .

 

No wonder people (younger people) coming to my studio always ask to borrow it, weird because they already have the Elektron or something. I thought this unit is already past its time and I just keep it for memories, I don't know its "status" in the community these days.

 

I saw i video where a guy has a og 303 and behringers ; i think he prefered the og for basslines and the behringer for acid'esk stuff.

about Roland
I would say the 303 has his own standing then there are the tr drummachines and then there are the grooveboxes . the grooveboxes are also loved for ad/da converters like all the pre2000 stuff
and then there is the mv8000 and sp808 .
All highly sought after .

 

i started making beats on a MC 808 and i loved it. still have it. this dude makes me wanna use it as a sampler again and have some fun with it.

 

Last edited: Mar 17, 2021

I would use it.Its different story to hook up just 1 or 2 vintage units into DAW than building bigger set up with mixer , clock and other utilitys .

 

The SP-808 was pretty neat for its time. You could add a digital expansion to it and MTC or MMC it to the Roland VS series hd recorders like the 1680 and 2480. but sought after? seems like the going rate for one is about 200$ on eBay.

oh, they also had a little program where you could load samples onto it's Zip disks from a computer.

 

I used to do in-store demo for all this stuff, and Yamaha and Korg, at the end of the 90s.
The build was cheap on all this generation of stuff, and it all sounded thin and bright.
Like a worse quality copy of the original Roland gear.
None of us in the store liked the sound of them, and thought of them as just toys when compared to the units they were trying to appear related to.

 

It was awful "for it's time". I was demoing them for a dealership back then.
What were you comparing it to?

 

There really was not all that much to directly compare it with, actually. 100 meg of samples per disk was a lot if you compared it to any of the other "groove box style samplers" from the same time frame.

 

How relevant is that when that's because any 'groovebox' thing was pretty much rubbish to begin with anyway, as I said from my experience above.
Hows about a W-30 with SCSI drive or zip drive? From 1990?
Makes 100MB 10 years later look like nothing.
I really don't know what you are saying or thinking.
The only boon from the 90s was zip drives.

These grooveboxes slowed down when there was too much sequence info!
They took ages to save!
The buttons and pots were designed to die!
They SOUND like a plastic version of the true Roland stuff, most importantly.
There IS a use for this sort of sound, don't get me wrong.
It just isn't for me.

 

from ebayklein

Roland SP-808 Groove Sampler Workstation inkl. OP1 Erweiterung
420 € VB -means something like 400

Maschine Mk2 Sampler Groovebox
190 €

 

Huh? Implying we can sample audio straight into it?
I though it was just a sample playback machine.
I would rather buy that, yeah!

 

Shit i forgot about that lol .
And no you rather dont want buy it has way worse quality than the non roland groovebox potis you mentioned .

 

All classics, from the 80s.

Unrelated! From the last 5 minutes of the 90s, from when after our music output in the UK was not our biggest export and we had sold British Leyland too.
Everything was starting to get watered down at this point, and the schmaltz in the charts should have revealed that to you.
Plastic sounds for a plastic world, ready to become more shutdown after 9/11.

 

I reckon you'll still be able to sell this thing for exactly what you got it for, sometime in the future.
Maybe for more, hopefully.
The younger gen will want the 90s nostalgia.