Roland MC-8 MicroComposer Unboxing & Demo

okay this is my unboxing video for this Circa late 7s vintage Roland mc8 sequencer I just got this on eBay and I've already opened the outer box here part's boring but let's see what's inside that's the boy this thing's huge this is the uh interface set that over there very nice and looks like we have a big honking manual written no doubt in very poorly translated English from the Japanese original I'm sure oh boy can't wait to dig into this yikes okay and got set of sheets for charting out your song and like more manuals let's see sample music and data and another is this the same thing looks like two copies of the instructions yeah all right good enough and cables stuff wow there's the main unit this thing is about one and a half times as big as I expected it to be it's really huge and I hope I can find room for it all right good enough for now okay I just got this thing the Roland mc8 there's that thing got it hooked up to my Pro one and I figured out the basics of how to program this thing so I'm just going to do a real quick demo here so we just powered it on there's nothing in the memory first thing you got to do is set the time base so time base and you can set it to anything you want um a good basic time base is 32 though so 32 then enter and then you got to set the tempo for some reason you got to hit the time base button again then the tempo button then your Tempo so let's go with 130 then you got to set the address which is basically tell it where you are in your composition so you do that with the measure set button and since we're starting something new we're just starting at zero here okay now you program your data in three separate passes basically you got your CV your step time and your gate time so we're going to go with CV first which is your control voltages which come out of here and first thing you do when you hit CV is you got to tell it I want cv1 assigned to gate one so you do that by hitting one and one and now you're ready to program your control voltages and there's a whole chart with references to what numbers correspond to what pitches but right now I'm not going to do anything musical I'm just going to do a quick like chromatic scale so you do that by punching in numbers so um we'll start with zero that's and then one 2 three four five 68 9 10 12 okay and then on your very last pitch or the last um Pitch of your measure you have to hit this measure End Key okay so now the next thing is we want to go back to the beginning so we hit the measure set again and we go and we hit zero so now we're back at the beginning we're going to do our step time now and this tells you basically what the rhythm of those notes that I just played are going to be so step time and then you got to tell it um gate one okay so we're on gate one so now at 30 at a time base of 32 um four I'm going to do this in 30 second notes so um at time base 32 4 equals a 30C notes so we'll hit four and since I just want to play the same rhythmic value for each note here I'm not doing anything complicated you can just keep hitting enter and step through all the different steps and then make sure you hit measure end at the end of it okay now we're going to do the gate times so we go to measure set again we reset ourselves back to zero and then we hit the gate time button and this basically tells you how long each note is not the rhythmic value but the actual length of the note so gate time and we're going to again that tells it gate channel one is what we're working on because this thing plays back over eight separate channels so since I've only got one syn hooked up to it right now we're just dealing with cv1 gate one okay so um since I want these notes to be detached if I if I put these gate times in at four for each note that would make it Legato um but I want to do them detached so I'm going to program gate times of three for each note so so we hit three and then we just keep hitting enter and that will give a gate time of three for each note and then measure end at 12 okay then back to measure set zero and now we can play what we've got oh and uh it's on cycle mode right now which I've noticed when it Cycles back it's it there's a there's an Ever So slight pause so it doesn't really cycle that smoothly I'm kind of disappointed in that because I you know thought cycle mode would be a good thing to have but we're going to turn that off for now so and and you can vary the tempo a little bit with this and there you have it oh and you can do uh you can uh set this portamento on as well and um that's it for basic programming this thing is uh pretty primitive but uh I could see how with a lot of patience you could uh work up a pretty great little arrangement with this thing