Roland DR-55
A four-sound rhythm box that ran on AA batteries and kept its memory alive when you switched it off.
Overview
The DR-55 is a small box that runs on four AA cells. It draws only 5.5 mA, so the batteries last a long time, and the patterns survive when the unit is turned off.
The voice set is spare: bass drum, snare, and hi-hat. There is a volume control, a tone control, and an accent control to push the basic sounds around. The hi-hat has its own on/off switch. No tom-toms.
The DR-55 can switch between patterns or variations at any time, and Modern Recording (November 1980, p.64) singled that out as one of its most attractive features. You can program a fill, switch to it mid-phrase, and switch back.
The sounds themselves are not trying to fool anyone. The bass drum is a short thump. The snare is noise-based. The hi-hat has its own character. These are percussion sounds in the abstract, not samples of real drums, and they sit in a mix the way a metronome sits in a mix - present and functional, and not pretending to be a drummer.
The DR-55 was the cheapest way to get a rhythm box in the early 1980s. High Fidelity (March 1983, p.69) listed it at $195, alongside the Korg KPR-77 at $569, the Roland TR-808 at $1,095, the Oberheim DMX at $2,895, and the Linn Drum at $2,995. It was the entry point, the box you bought when you wanted programmable patterns and could not yet justify a TR-808. High Fidelity described it in the same survey as having one snare drum, one bass drum, no tom-toms, and a hi-hat - the barest kit in the comparison.
The unit is battery powered.
It is not a drum machine in the sense that a Linn or an Oberheim is a drum machine. It is a rhythm box with memory. The patterns you write stay written.
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