Why I'll miss my Roland MC-303

The MC303 was first introduced to the consumer British music market in 1996 by the Roland corporation, I was 13. In 1996 the chart-toppers of the time were; Underworld, Robert Miles, Techno head, BBE and of course The Prodigy, indeed as I was a big X-Files fan then (who wasn't?) my first ever CD purchase from HMV in Sunderland was Mark Snow's X-Files Theme tune. Ah memories.  The sounds inside this box firmly represented the sounds of the time, wonderfully gritty and lo-fi, with the sense that they had been sampled in from some questionable source material.

Whilst the groove box could be operated live, at the time I found it quiet restrictive navigating the 14 segment red led display and that all programmes needed to be loaded and parts muted or solo'd to build the arrangement.  I think now I realise it was quite flexible but I didn't fully appreciate it at the time as I was more interested in using it as a sound module with my DAW.

It was lots of fun digging into all of the sounds and in hindsight I wish I had committed to bouncing the output audio down to waves and layering up to create more dynamic sounds rather than keeping the groove box plugged in as a constant sound source for each time I loaded up a Cubase project, then I would have had the original stems to play around with in Ableton! Ah well, hindsight is a wonderful thing!

Maybe one day I'll get a hold of another one and treat it with a bit more respect and foresight for production.