Roland Boutique TR-08 (808)

The Lounge Other Gear
#226

thanks!

#227

When synced from Octatrack the swing is disabled on the tr-08. I tried just sending transport and no tempo but then it wont start on time.

#228

Have you tried just setting the same BPM value to both boxes? Easy enough to align the downbeats with the elektron’s tempo nudge after that. IME the TR-08&09 and elektrons stay sync’d nicely with identical bpm values.

#229

Yeah, just not ideal.
But actually I cant get swing to work at all atm. I am using pre-scale 4.
I will do some more investigating :mag_right:

#230

Use the gain setting in the menu. It goes up to 200.

#231

Looking for a used TR-08 currently.

I just tested a proof of concept (with another USB audio device) to overcome the TR-08’s rather latency-ridden multi-track USB implementation.
I prefer to avoid aggregate devices, especially in such a case where a fast interface could be slowed down by a Boutique.

This work around includes using a second DAW just for the sole purpose of recording from the Boutique’s USB multi-channel driver.

Using Bitwig I can record from another USB interface than my MOTU Ultralite, which is all hooked up and wired into Ableton Live (my main DAW).
I’ll be plugging the TR-08’s stereo analog 1/8" output into my MOTU, for lower latency monitoring purposes only, whilst the 10 multitrack voice outputs are recorded over the Roland USB driver in Bitwig. Crank the record buffer all the way up in BitWig, because why not? Might as well add some for safety.
Then after recording in Bitwig I can grab those .wavs from the recording temp folder and drag them into my Ableton Live project. (for any of you who don’t own a Bitwig License, you still have access to that folder if running the demo!)

Should suffice! At least the proof of concept works on my quad i5 2.9ghz with 12GB RAM.

You could also use GarageBand, though v10 doesn’t give you any buffer settings to tweak. Really, most any DAW without REWIRE capability should work.

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#232

another thing that’s not discussed enough is the midi control over shuffle (both positive and negative).

elektron doesn’t expose swing to midi control, but with the 8s and an external midi sequencer you should be able to get some interesting ‘groove templates’ going due to this parameter being midi controllable. it also gives you something of a workaround for the lack of microtiming on the step sequencer, at least over the swung steps.

caveat : I’ll see over the next few weeks whether my enthusiasm for this is actually warranted lol