I don't have an especially wide variety of drum machines hiding amongst my growing pile of synths, and one of the areas that didn't have great coverage was the late 80s style digital e-drums. Didn't, until now that is.
The Kawai R50e is a drum machine hailing from the late 80s and is filled with samples of atomic-blast style gated reverb snares, Simmons style toms, and sampled bass and orchestra hits for that extra "the 90s are just around the corner" vibe.
These hard-hitting drum sounds are favoured by people producing in the industrial genre, but they also work well with synth pop and its elevated evolution city pop. It's the latter that's of primary interest to me.
There was nothing terribly wrong with this unit when it arrived, quite appropriately, from Japan. It was uncharacteristically filthy though, with plenty of tobacco tar, sweat, and a little bit of mold coating it inside and out. Luckily it cleaned up pretty nicely, though it still has a bit of an aroma if you get right in close and sniff, but most people don't play drum machines with their nose so that's not really a big deal.
Also arriving from the land of the rising sun in the same package was this delightful rack effects unit.
This is the Boss VF-1, which is, along with the SX-700 that I covered in another blog post, the follow up to the SE-70 and SE-50, which I also covered in another blog post. Other than a few guitar-specific models that I probably won't bother with, this pretty much completes my collection of Boss rack multi-effects boxes.
This unit's claim to fame largely revolves around the inclusion of the COSM amp and mic simulators, but other party tricks include an acoustic guitar simulator, and a guitar-to-midi processor that lets you control a synth with a guitar signal. Also according to this preset it'll give you free gender reassignment surgery so that's cool.
It's a little more guitar-focused than my other Boss rack effects, but it'll still be useful for my purposes.
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