Behringer RD-8 Review | V2 firmware + everything you need to know

this is the behringer rda drum machine which is based on the classic roland tr-808 from 1980 which might be the most important and influential drum machine in music history the rd8 has been available for some time but bellinger has made some significant software improvements recently and with the newest firmware update 206 it's time to take a closer look at what this drum machine brings to the table i bought this rd8 with my own money so here's my unbiased and honest review hello everyone this is the build quality is good quite a step up from the rd6 for example no wobbly knobs nice switches and buttons solid casing i'd say it's on par with what competitors like arturia are offering in the same price range it has a good weight to it and i must say i was quite surprised at how large it actually is if you don't have much room this could be a deal breaker for you [Music] master and headphone volume effect section a few edit commands mode selector sync settings the sequencer and finally the instruments and their parameters the rd8 is powered by an 18v dc power adapter which is included a full-size stereo headphone jack which has its own volume control the mono main output standard quarter inch mono jack whenever you hear the drum machine in this review it is recorded from this output straight to an audio interface with no post processing a return input which is a mono return after the fx bus a usb b type connector the rd8 supports midi over usb but not audio over usb it's class compliant so you don't need to install a driver to use it midi in midi out and midi through 11 full size quarter inch mono outputs one for each instrument whenever you plug something in there it takes away the respective instrument from the mix out the individual outs are not routed through the filter or the wave designer and are not affected by the main volume knob and finally we have three full-size trigger outputs and the mini jacks sink in and out on the rd8 all instrument sounds are generated by analog circuitry i'm going to quickly play through the sounds adjusting parameters where available so you can get a feeling for what's possible bass drum [Music] snare drum [Music] low mid and high tom the toms can each be switched to congas so once more low mid and high conga you can switch the clevis to a rim shot now this is way too loud in comparison so i'll dial it down a bit or maybe a whole lot i guess that's the price you pay as an early adopter this rim volume problem has since been corrected by bearing and later production runs check out muffet's synthmod page if you want to know more and how to correct this problem by yourself maracas the maracas can be switched to a hand clap [Music] by the way don't be alarmed if the first hand clap hit is missing its reverb tail it's the same on some original 808s and has something to do with a capacitor that needs charging over the first few hits ah and here it is the musical equivalent of the wilhelm scream the iconic 808 cowbell [Music] lovely symbol open hat closed head the open hat and closed head form a choke group one silence is the other one it plays which imitates the behavior of a real hi-hat the sounds can't be panned left or right as the drum machine internally operates only in mono there are no presets or kits on the rd8 what you see dialed in on the controls is exactly the sound you'll get as a final sound shaping tool we have an effects bus we can choose which instruments are sent there with the send button the selected instruments are then collectively processed by the wave designer and then the filter the filter can be turned on or off and toggled between low pass and high pass there are controls for cutoff and resonance you can use it to do filter sweeps [Music] or emphasize certain frequencies of an instrument the bass drum for example the wave designer is a transient shaper with this you have control over the attack and sustain portion of the incoming sound [Music] by the way the headphone output is completely dry you can't hear any of the effects on it and if you plug in individual outs they will still be audible on the headphones unlike the main out where they will be removed if you like the sounds of the rd8 go check out our sample pack on patreon and in case you were wondering what the rd8 sounds like through a fuzz pedal [Music] ah an absolute drum machine classic and the song that took the 808 to the top of the music charts in many countries whitney houston's i want to dance with somebody [Music] and this is ah let me get that for you revolution 808 by daft punk [Music] and finally clint eastwood by gorillaz [Music] the rd8 has 16 pattern banks oddly they're called songs here with 16 patterns each so 256 patterns in total which is plenty each pattern can have a length of up to 64 steps playing and editing patterns is pretty straightforward just remember to turn record on or else every change you make will be undone by the running light of the sequencer that's pretty cool for one-off changes during live performances but can be quite irritating when starting out the currently selected instrument can be live recorded by tapping the trigger button if you want to brush up on how to program patterns you can take a look at the first episode of our drum machine 101 course quickly chaining patterns together is not possible you'll have to resort to song mode for that and here's a real treat the rd8 has a polymeter mode which allows each instrument to have a different pattern length this is a small excerpt of numa by tool we have a closed head pattern that's just four steps long four to the floor basically but on top of that place a conga and rimshot pattern that's just three steps long these two rhythms interact with each other and drift in and out of sync finally there's the bass drum pattern which is 32 steps long i found it weird that polymeter's global setting by default this could confuse the heck out of you when working on your non-polymeter patterns but you can change it to be a pattern-specific setting in the preferences which makes more sense in my opinion [Music] the rd8 has a global or total accent if you want to know more about accents take a look at drum machine 101 episode 2 where we use the rda to explain global accents to divide a step into sub steps you have to enter settings repeat here you can select a step to split into sub steps sadly in this mode you can't see where your active steps are it's like an additional layer on top of your actual steps so you have to memorize them beforehand or listen to them while the sequence is playing after selecting a step you can activate note repeat and choose a division the rd8 supports 2 4 and 8 sub steps that should cover most of our needs but the whole process of placing substeps is so cumbersome beringer could have easily used the different led color states to give you a clue as to where your underlying active steps actually are or here's an idea why not make things even quicker by holding a step and then simply pressing the division it's not like these buttons are already in use in that context but sub steps can also be live recorded with the note repeat performance feature which might even be the more comfortable option for you if you deactivate and activate a step it resets it so this is a quick way to remove any subdivision in addition to substeps we also have a flam option per step let's place flams on all of these snare hits if the flam width is at zero the flam has no effect but as soon as you increase the flam width you can hear that it sounds as if the drum is hit with two sticks almost at the same time with just the tiniest bit of delay in between which makes it sound fuller if you want to hear how that sounds after adding some reverb and compression take a listen to our in the atonite cover pretty standard you can swing a pattern from 50 [Music] all the way to 75. [Music] nope the rd8 obeys the grid all steps are quantized [Music] nope but you can automate the filter cut off which can make for some very interesting sounds we can live record the movement of the filter cutoff knob or manually enter values per step the transition between the values is then smoothed out so you don't have any sudden jumps do note that this automation is global and not saved with each pattern the bpm ranges from 20 to 240 no decimals though by default the tempo setting is saved with each pattern but you also have the option to save the tempo per song or even globally there's no metronome but you can tap the tempo by pressing tap hold three times the sequencer can be set to five different tempo modifiers which are saved with each pattern half speed for eighth notes three quarter speed for eighth note triplets normal speed for sixteenth notes one and a half times speed for sixteenth triplets and double speed for thirty second notes the sync options can be changed here the default is the rd8's own internal sequencer clock then there's midi midi over usb and clock meaning the sync input for the latter you have a few clock rates to choose from 1 2 4 24 and 48 pulses per quarter as you saw earlier the rd8 has three trigger outputs for triggering external gear trigger out 1 and 2 can be assigned in the settings to any instrument you'd like while trigger out 3 is fixed and permanently tied to the accent track you can't see which patterns are used or empty that always bugs me that feature would have been so easy to implement with the rd8s multi-color leds other than that there's a pretty good offering of convenience features you can erase patterns single instruments whole banks there's even a sweep erase function in earlier versions if you wanted to copy a pattern you had to go the bureaucratic route copy select what to copy press copy select where to copy it press copy again sign here twice mail the envelope and oh look we're already done now you can use the new fast copy method just hold copy and press the destination ta-da you can't copy and paste single instrument tracks but with the new firmware you can now copy and paste whole pages but only inside of the current pattern if you want to backup your machine or import and export patterns you can do this via usb using the behringer synth tribe tool [Music] well let's see the rd8 has a roll or node repeat feature [Music] then there's step repeat which loops one two four or eight steps you can mute and solo instruments and also instantly clear these mutes and solos no steps are lost if we shorten the pattern so we can use this as a live performance tool as mentioned before we can turn record off and any steps we place are undone by the running light of the sequencer in the newer firmware versions autosave is turned on by default meaning every change you make to a pattern is immediately saved but if you turn auto save off you can mess with the pattern during your live performance and when you're done you can simply return it to its last saved state [Music] one thing which is always very important to me patterns can be duplicated seamlessly meaning you can create a copy of the current pattern and switch to that copy without interrupting playback the rd8 even has a pattern rollout function you can extend the pattern length and have the new space filled with a copy of what was already programmed this way you can seamlessly add another bar to your pattern and already have something to work with instead of silence that's a good starting point to make changes and add some variation the instruments can only be triggered individually if the sequencer is not running [Music] the pads themselves are not pressure sensitive but you can hold tap hold for an accent but you could always connect a midi device to trigger your sounds externally in case you were wondering no sadly there aren't any midi ccs to control any of the sound parameters then we have random steps in this menu you can select instruments and place steps one of the selected instruments will be randomly triggered wherever a random step is placed another option are probability steps under settings probability we can choose which steps should be affected by probability after leaving the menu we can set a probability value in percent currently the probability steps play every time now only 50 percent of the time and now never song mode is pretty straightforward but we only have 16 slots to place patterns in which really isn't that much on the upside each slot can repeat up to 255 times another limitation only patterns of the current bank can be used to build a song but the rd8 gives you another mode in which you can chain whole songs together here's one of my favorite features autofill it allows you to piggyback a shorter pattern onto the end of your current pattern this is the main pattern and here we have a few different fills programmed in these patterns the fills are shorter than the main pattern using autofill we can cue a fill which is then played instead of the pattern's regular ending to be honest i don't get why you can only use the last four patterns as autofill especially since you have to explicitly press a button to initiate it and to add insult to injury you can't use autofill in song mode only when playing the patterns manually i only found two bugs since the new firmware was released flam has no effect on the closed hat and contrary to what is said in the manual the auto scroll setting is not saved and always off when loading a song this means that you have to turn it on manually every time after loading a song or else your song will be stuck on the current pattern and here's a design decision by bearinger you might want to know about instrument mixing in the rd8 is designed in a way that the signal polarity of the individual instrument outs is inverted in relation to the main out under certain circumstances if you don't know what that means it probably won't be a problem for you but if you're interested you can read more on mafit's synthmod page one more thing there's this separator line between step nine and ten it is so irritating it throws me off so often when placing steps because usually there are visual separators only between every fourth step then again maybe it's an elaborate ploy by bearing her to get us away from four to the floor anyway don't look at this line just use the step colors for orientation lovely the rd8 is currently on sale for about 320 euros or 350 us dollars i've talked to synth modern muffets about the rd8 and even from a circuit design perspective it seems that this drum machine was a bit rushed and could have done with some additional testing and refinement before its release if you're into modding and handy with a soldering iron the rd8 could prove to be a creative playground for you with a few easter eggs here and there as a normal user i think the biggest source of confusion is the fact that the rda distinguishes between live data and stored data let me give you an example here i'm erasing an entire bank of patents with the erase song command every pattern in this bank is now empty but as soon as i switch to another bank and back again all patterns reappear that's because the erase bank command by default erases only the live data that's stored in the working memory not the data in the permanent storage and the live data is discarded as soon as i switch banks in fact i encountered so many weird and inconsistent things while making our rda cheat sheet that i had to introduce a special icon for it and i've used it quite a bit 14 times on 6 pages you can check it out on our patreon every single thing i've talked about in this review and more is explained in detail there all quirks and oddities aside it's one of my absolute favorite drum machines i love the sound and with the used firmware update there's really not that much left to complain about the rd8 has a very good sequencer and it's a playable instrument with loads of performance features it also offers a surprisingly deep level of configuration you can decide for many settings whether they persist globally throughout one song or just the current pattern you can even assign midi notes to the instruments without connecting a computer is there anything you'd like to know about the rd8 in detail let us know in the comments that's it for this review hit subscribe and ring the bell so you don't miss anything [Music] bring me

Channel: Captain Pikant

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Id: 60fJuhdwVPg

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021