I used a Boss DR-670 for quite a while, years ago. It was pretty nice, albeit suffering from 'square' sounds mostly; you know, the really slick, produced drum-sounds. It had some cool stuff, and I remember using a choked cymbal; but I can't remember if the cymbal was a preset sound, or whether the choking was made possible by assigning it to a group mute (like you do with open/closed hi-hats).

Anyway, I traded it years ago against a near-mint Roland R8MKII, after reading all about the human feel stuff and the fact that it seemed one of the better drummachines out there. It had almost triple the amount of onboard sounds, compared to the regular R8 (200 vs 68) and the possibilities are endless.
Another big reason to buy it, were the 8 individual outputs! Later on, I added all the cards (minus the ones, that were allready in the onboard sounds), from which I love the Dry card, and to a lesser extent, the Jazz card. (Jazz Brush is almost completely covered by the onboard samples, as well as USA Powerdrums, Contemporary and Dance.

Well, it's a great drumcomputer, but its learningcurve is really steep. I hardly program any patterns with it and almost always just play it 'live'/real time on the pads. But that's where the R8MKII gets -1; the pads are -while velocity sensitive- hard plastic instead of rubber, like on the DR-670, R70 and Zoom RT-series.

So, last week I was browsing a Dutch craiglist-like site (Marktplaats) and found a nice Zoom Rhythmtrak RT-323.

[img]http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/produc...23/323body.JPG[/img]

I heard it once, years ago, when a bassplayer was using it to jam with and were impressed by the realism of the sounds, mainly the hi-hats, so I bought it.
It arrived today and I've been fiddling with it for a few hours now. Really a lot of drumsounds (360+), with like 55 kicks, 55 snare's, but the cymbals are a bit lacking in numbers; only 8 crashes.
Ofcourse, by tuning the pitch you can create variations.

Recording patterns has been easy, I've created my first user-kit already with a really live/realistic sound; which will lend itself better to compression etc., instead of using already polished/produced sounds.
You can add 2 drumkits per pattern, as well as a bassguitar sound (55 basses present, from upright jazz, to funky slap, to analog square/saw and acoustic picked, with everything in between).

The cool thing is, the nuance of the drums vary a bit with the pressure applied to the pads, adding to the realism. (this nuance was programmable in the R8MKII).
You can use the Sound Jammer fader too, to edit stuff (volume, pitch, pan or sound) in realtime, which works great, BUT...
eventhough I've managed to shorten or lengthen the sound's decay 'live' while the pattern plays, I can't seem to store it in the drumkit itself.
It's day one, so it could be a hidden function, but if not, that's kinda lame that the possibility IS there live, but not to help to tailor the sounds in the user drumkits.

Anyway, to sum up:
R8MKII=great, but difficult. Realistic sounds possible, but will sound kinda dated here and there (then again, so does about every sound on the Alesis SR16!).

RT-323=great and easy. Very realistic (less dated) sounds; lots of options.

Oh, I don't do dance/hiphop stuff, but mainly rock/metal and occasionally some blues, surf and funk. So I don't need any TR*0* sounds basically.

I've done some more comparising...

Overall, it's easier to get big, fat and tight/solid sounds from the R8MKII. The Zoom RT-323 is voiced 'looser'; more epic/ballad types of sounds with medium/big verbs and such.
So far playing with the pitch of different instruments (the snare mainly) has been a great impact on the overall sound and feel; I had one of the pads of the Zoom set up as a snare-pad for a TR-808-ish sound. I tried to tune the Zoom's snare to the 'original' TR-808 snare of the Roland R8MKII; in so doing I came close by tuning the Zoom's snare down to -3.60. Then I was browsing through some different snares and it struck me (no pun intended) that a whole different snare, that sounded thin on its '0' tuning, suddenly came alive with the -3.60 setting!

I'm hardly a TR-808/909 expert, but the samples from the Roland R8MKII 'feel' more authentic. The TR-909 kick is big and boomy, but has a sharp attack to it, which I cannot emulate with any of the Zoom's 'hiphop/techno/dance' kicks.

While the Zoom is very easy to set up in terms of sound editing and such, the Roland R8MKII started to show its qualities by just its sounds and editability. On the Zoom you can adjust pitch, pan, volume and output (main L+R or Sub Out 1 or Sub Out 2).
On the Roland you can add Decay and Nuance to the list. Decay is OH-SO-IMPORTANT! As it lets you tailor overly verby (dated) snare sounds to more dry, sharp, focussed snare sounds.
And nuance too. Some samples (kicks, snares and toms mainly) have their nuance attached to the velocity; strike a pad harder and pitch or tone changes. This is also present in some of the Zoom's sounds (also kicks and snares mainly), but Nuance is not an edit-parameter unfortunately.

Since step-recording and live-pattern recording is so much easier on the Zoom, I wouldn't be surprised if I were to use the Zoom as a MIDI-master and the R8MKII as a mere sound-module. Or I could buckle up, read the extensive Roland manual, learn to use the Human Feel patches and be a master of the R8MKII...

Man, what some folks have with owning lots of synths, I'm beginning to suspect I have that with drumcomputers! (as it is, I'm gonna buy a near mint Roland R70 too! All the good stuff from the R8MKII, + Rubber pads, Rhythm pattern generator, FX (Reverb and Delay + Chorus/Flanger) engines, and Attack Damp and Brilliance parameters....and the positional pad!

O.k., so I bought the Roland R-70 a few weeks after I got the Zoom RT-323...

I've done some more comparisons and the R-70 beats the R-8mkII in terms of ease of use and playability, mostly courtesy of the rubber pads (instead of the R-8's hard plastic one).
But being a drummachine from 1991 opposed to a 2001 one, more of the R-70's sounds are a bit dated. BUT, it has a few more parameters to edit the sounds than the Zoom; Attack Damp, Nuance, Decay and it has 2 fx-sends for the 2 internal effect (1 being either reverb or delay and the 2nd one being chorus or flanger).

Back to the RT-323; I've spent a good deal of the time, listening to ALL the kick and snare samples (120 in total!) and programmed 3 pads with different pitches (-2, 0 and +2) and walked all the samples through those pads, so I could determine whether the basic (0) sound should be pitched higher, lower or left alone. In the end I came up with about 9 very realistic and useable kicks and maybe 6 or so snares (from 67 samples!!!).
One of my favourite snares does have a bit of a natural verb tail to it, and here I could really use a decay parameter, to make it sound more dry.
Nevertheless, I created about 5 kits now (Live, allround, Metal, Big, Dry) and I will probably make some more variations on the Big, Dry and Live kits.
Also, I've grown fond of some of the Zoom samples, OVER the Rolands! One being that aforementioned snare; a very realistic one, nothing too over the top sounding.
The one thing that the Roland R-70 handles better are the natural decay tails of its cymbals. Hit a splash, let it ring out and it dies out naturally. The Zoom's cymbals seem gated at the end of their decay. Mind you, we're talking 4-6 seconds of decay differences here (the Zoom's cutting out after 3 or so seconds, with the Roland doing 5-6 seconds), but I'm nitpicky.

why are you wasting money buying these old crappy drum machines when you could be getting superior drummer, ezdrummer, addictive drums or bfd?

If you have used them for quite a while and you still think they're crappy, be my guest, but if not, I wouldn't be so quick to judge them, just because they're somewhat older.

But I don't use a PC now for recording and I like hardware outboard gear; hitting the pads, playing realtime, instead of programming stuff in a grid.

The ones you mention; are those the sample-packs only, the programming software (to create patterns/songs) or both?

they're basically rompler players that don't trigger the same sample in a row so you don't get that nasty machine gun sound that you get with most of the hardware drum machines and modules

they give you total control over each microphone so you can mix the drums however you please

and you can play them real time all you want with any electronic kit and a midi interface

And then you have to add your own samples to EZDrummer, or does it come with realistic (multi-layer) samples?

PS,
there's a really cheap Zoom RT323 for sale on Ebay right now. 60 euro's!!!
Seller is in Ireland and he's shipping within Europe.

Zoom Rhythmtrak RT323 - eBay (item 260456002578 end time Aug-06-09 12:09:13 PDT)

Ezdrummer and addictive drums come with great samples..I lover AD's samples..very realistic!!
PS. you can add sample packs but the stock ones work for me!!

Hmm, something to consider then, should I integrate a PC in the future in my studio...

btw, I love your sig! So true. The funny thing is, the guys with an ACTUAL great studio (in terms of gear) don't mention that, and sometimes don't even have their studio-website in their sig.

Thinking about picking up a Zoom RT 323. I like how it has 2 additional outputs plus a input. Perfect for pairing up a Behringer TD3 or Crave straight in. Plus being light from the looks of it. I guess there is a 3.3v Smartmedia card port, but it’s only compatible with a Zoom PS2 digital mixer. Too bad it can’t access a Zoom ST224 sample. But it can trigger a 224 by midi I’d imagine. It will depend how much I can keep in my next check, but I’ll have to score one for $110-150.

Never heard about Zoom RT 323. Looks pretty interesting to me. Need to try it out!

Holy 12 yr old necro-bumps, Batman!

Are you still rocking the RT-323? I've been playing with one, and one thing I've been disappointed with is how it only successfully syncs/chases (via MIDI clock) on the downbeat of bar one. Talking about syncing to an external master like a hard disk mutltitrack recorder. Once the multitrack is elsewhere in playback, and you stop playback, it will not sync back up properly upon playback resume. It's really a bummer. The SR18 has no problem in this regard.

Hi, yep, sure am, although I haven't fired it up in months.
Also, I don't really use (a lot of) MIDI in my studio, so I never ran into issues with that tbh.

This thread inspired me to get RT-323, so now I have it.
But I haven't used it much yet.
This drum machine seems to have a lot of potential, but it apparently requires some learning curve. It's not like Behringer RD-6 that is super intuitive and doesn't really require manual. Need some free time to learn this machine. And honestly I was not excited by its drum sounds much. Sounds more plastic to me. I think Alesis SR-16 has better drum sounds overall.

I bought the RT-323 to pair up with my TD-3. It has some very nice sounds and I am using to to play out live techno. It is fairly intuitive to use, has a massive range of drum sounds and it is handy having the four outs on the back. There is quite a lot of functions, one could spend a long time setting the thing up to how they want it.

Most of the drum sounds are good. I find I don't like a lot of the bass sounds, but there are a few gems there.

It doesn't seem to transmit the midi clock in song mode if you are using that to quickly change between patterns and fills if you are playing it that way unless it is in record mode.

The manual is quite easy to follow.

Would recommend. One of the last cheap drum machines.

I’ve seen them on Reverb for $80+shipping. It’s a no brainer. Just need the extra cash.