8 replies · 547 views
On topic, despite what you may be initially thinking.
Special plea to the musos out there - does anyone have any of these Roland Quick Disks that they would be prepared to part with for a goodly sum? I have just picked up an old Roland PR-100 sequencer that I want to use as a bass sequencer for some Digital tracks, but I can't find any of the bloody disks anywhere!
Please help an old monkey in distress! 
oh jesus mate, those things were like rocking horse shite even back in the day...AND fucking expensive, and not exactly capacious. I once walked away from an (almost free) akai S700 ( or 900, whichever) cos I knew I'd never keep it supplied.
The best advice I can give you is to start looking at roland and Akai forums and newsgroups....maybe someone knows a source of them, or a way to mod a 3.5 into it.
I suffer an even odder problem, because DSDD 2.5's are not easy found, I end up with a whole pile od DSHD's....which my Atari and My Ensoniq Mirage are both SERIOUSLY grouchy about writing to, poor things re so old they can't get the current up to leave a mark on the tigher grains :)
You could always MIDI dump it's brain to a friendly PC or Atari, or does it do tape dumps?
And another Edit: Odd tho it sounds, Roland may be able to help....they'll still do a battery refit on a 303 or juno, so you never know.
BUMPED on yer behalf And cos I feel a trademark rant coming on.
Well I been searching round all my nefarious net haunts and the conclusion I come to is....you're boned, unless it MIDI dumps, you really are pretty much shit outta luck.
What were they thinking? I mean I know 5.25's take the name Floppy" a bit seriously, but 3.5's were around....and even in their primitive form they beat piss outta these things..... the thought process musta been...
Let's not use the format that holds 160k a side and is shared with computers making it cheaper...instead let's use these wierdo things that cost a fucking fortune cos it's only us, Akai and a coupla word processors that use em, oh and the best thing is, they hold 64k a side.
and a 1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a rant
Same genius, I'd guess, who put the battery on half their gear in a posistion so deep and so secure that any mission to change or examine it could very easily be filmed with a macrovision lense and sold off as a great sci fi epic. And you can't leave it to rot either, the whole sodding memory is usually wired thru it in some fiendish Japanese plot to confuse dumb western keyboard players. I've seen what happens to Roland gear when that little heart stops beating, it'd be funny to hear, or sad, like watching a great spostsman reduce to a dribbling wreck....if it wasn't for the fact that after an hour with it you've lost the will to live. Mate of mine, seriously into his ACEEEEEEEED, finally gets himself a 303, thinks it's cheap (300 quid ROFLMAO, anyone else remember "tb303, 30 quid or will throw in with plectrum" type ads in about 86?), because "memory cell's gone in it mate but it'll be ok while it's on"..LIAR! After my mate had gone gently mental for about about a week, he handed it to me, along with a manual, and said "don't wanna see it again until you've made it go". I dunno if you've ever seen the 303's manual or actually tried to use one sensibly, but oh dear.
Manual is trans englished yes good by man that be zerowing life giver to "all your base are belong to us" can you see it's the funny net movie mister?.
nuff said? I mean all Roland Manuals are a bit out there, English and Japanse are not easy languages to go between I'd imagine, but they all make sense among the odd tenses and things....but this....man, we used to read this shit out to each other for hours, and just roll around, we een did requests "read te bit abot the cutoff again" etc....mind you....the hash was good back then :) And as for how the thing's meant to work... you tell it the notes to play, then how to play them....baffling. All the more baffling when the memory is gone, it took MONTHS of painful experiment to finally determine with scientific precision that the thing wanted fuck all to do with ANYTHING some bloody over evolved monkey wanted it to play, it wouldn't store DICK. A while later I found out that one of the engineers in the college used to DO battery fits and midi retro's on old roland gear, and he was able to describe the insanity to fine detail.
However, we ARE talking about a 303, so I for one had no actual musical interest whatsoever in telling to play anything. No, I just wanted to start it up and see what it felt like doing today, which as any acidhead will tell you, is the true path to 303 nirvana, the ghost in the machine knows how to make you dance. AND I swear it knows who's using it, when I had it, it would change time sig and all on it's own, and start embellishing it's riffs...when other people used it, it just spewed out dancefloor creaming grooves. Probably for the Best that NO never got one, I think the meeting of the Randomness of NO and the randomness of a 303 could have destabilized spacetime or soemthing.
you know I find the TB303 easy enough to use, you've got to bash some notes in, then get some timings in (fairly randomly), and top it off with some accents, octaves and slides and then see if you've got anything worth using. As for the 'memory', if there are batteries in it it should retain the patterns. Now, programming an MC202 is a totally different matter! Don't get me started. And as for the battery in a Juno.....what were they thinking!!
It seems the 303 has a battery like the juno, it just last longer, and this particular example was just fooked. So I'm told, and I wasn't going inside someone else's 303 to find out :)
I may have found the method easier if the frigger had been working :)
Missed a 202 for 70 quid by about a day once, it had been there for months, and went the day before I brought money. It woulda been perfect, cos it's external channel could have driven the moog, since moog and roland are compatible.
So oldmonkey, not having used one,( I can barely remember it, it's the one that came out as the "other half" of the mt32, and looks a bit like an mc500, right?), I dunno....can it bulkdump or tapesave? At least Roland answered, I spent years trying to get casio to admit they ever even had a pro division. in the end I tearfully binned my cz3000 and am now always on the lookout for another.
Tim, I'll check with my buddy at the local music shop tomorrow. I'd swear I've seen some in a box around the place a few years back. Will let you know what I find out.
As you know, they're exceptionally rare. I bought an Akai S700 a few years ago, the drive was f***ed almost from the off and I was given just three disks for it. Like yourself, I attempted to find some online but there are very few out there. Even Roland and Akai themselves don't have any.
If the piece of kit you have is able to load and save sequences over MIDI that might be a solution, although this wouldn't help much in a live situation.
Try Sound On Sound's readers' ads?
Good luck!
I dug around the stock room for an hour digging through old stockpiles of floppies at the music store and came up empty. The owner recalls having some but isn't sure where they might have vanished to over the years. He's has promised to let me know if he turns anything up. Sorry... I thought for certain he had some stashed away somewhere. Best of luck with your quest.
