Vintage Synth Explorer Forums

Clearing out old studio storage, came across a Roland R-8 and R-8mkII with supplies and a mk1 manual.... Great news, right, well, but...

Unfortunately, the mkII has a cracked screen -- it powers up and I can poke around a little from faint memory, but it's about 75% illegible.

Anyone have any pointers on either slaving the mkII entirely to the mkI to access all of its sounds OR getting at all of its goodies externally via DAW/midi?

I'm also looking into a replacement screen and repair but it seems it might cost as much as the thing itself if not more, so unless I am able to fall back in love with it, probably not gonna happen.

As an alternate, any idea if the screens are interchangeable? I gather there is a minute character difference, but any thoughts on how well a straight swap might work?

I was going to suggest this. I guess it would work as I believe the screens are identical.

Regarding MIDI sync, that is possible and the manual will show you how to do this (I have a Mk 1 btw) but you'd still have to program patterns on the broken machine.

You could control the broken machine from the working one via MIDI as well but you'd have to match the MIDI notes of some sounds to those of the other machine. On the R8, MIDI notes are assigned to the sounds themselves, as opposed to the pads.

Regarding programming the R8 via your DAW, this is also possible but you would lose some of the features of the R8, namely the human feel grooves. Also, while It syncs well to Cubase, the Mk 1's response to external MIDI notes is ridiculously sluggish. I once connected it to my son's MIDI drum kit to check if this was a myth and it was virtually unplayable as a sound source as the notes lagged big time.

I would persevere with the idea of cannibalising one machine to save the other.