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okay, first, it has exactly 26 drum sounds, four of which are snares and three are bass drums. bassdrum3 and snare4 really want to be an 808 and i'll let them because i'm not that picky. it has 30 voices (not including drums), some of which are pretty nifty.
it's sequencer is great: like the new grooveboxy things, you can program patterns of so many bars which you'll later assemble into a song, except the transposing of each pattern into a song with chord changes is soooo much easier than the mc303 in that you arrange songs by chord name and pattern number, not just pattern number and too-bad-about-the-chords. each pattern has a bass track, drum track, and two chord tracks (whose harmony will be controlled by the chords you select when arranging songs, plan ahead two minutes and they're golden) all of which you can record the specific rythms by step or overdub. here's the cool part: for songs, there are four more sequencer tracks to use to make continuous melodies...you know how that's impossible on the mc303 without making millions of redundant patterns to carry it? plus you can theorhetically bounce (mix) tracks together midi-wise to get the most out of these four tracks.
okay, so even though the sequencer beats the holy shit out of the mc303, the sounds don't, but maybe with a sampler or other outboard sound -- oh wait, who cares, it's smaller than a vhs tape. it fits in my pocket and runs on 6 AA batteries. the mc303 sits at home wishing it could come out and play. so today while i was in traffic on the 405 i put together a little funk pattern by playing the rubber keyboard then quantitizing and overdubbing. after i finished making a nice slightly syncopated chord progression [c--eb|-f-d] in song mode i had to stop playing with it or else i really would rear end that car next time. did i mention i had it plugged into my car stereo's tape-adapter? oooh the demos at full volume.....
the best piece of $80 synth equipment i've ever bought.
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