Roland TR-606 Drumatix
A fully programmable drum kit for under £200, sold alongside the TB-303 as half of a rhythm section you could carry home in two boxes.
Overview
The TR-606 Drumatix was Roland's budget answer to its own TR-808, and the advertising was unusually candid about the pecking order. A period Roland/Boss dealer listing described the Drumatix as a fully programmable, chain-linking electronic drum kit priced under £200. It then spelled out what the 808 added on top: handclaps, variable drum tunings, latin percussion instruments, and individual audio outputs. That one sentence is the most honest spec sheet the 606 ever had. Whatever the 808 did beyond the basics, the 606 didn't - and the price reflected it.
What the Drumatix does have is memory. A period dealer advertisement lists 56 memories, with the ability to recall a pattern, edit it, and still keep the original patch intact. That last detail matters more than the raw count: the 606 lets you audition a variation without destroying what you wrote, which is the kind of workflow feature budget gear usually skips. For writing demos and masters alike, as the same listing put it, 56 patterns with non-destructive editing is a workable amount of room.
The sound is the other half of the story. A December 1983 Polyphony (p.24) article by Perry Cook opened with the author's own buying criteria, ranked in order of importance: drum sound quality first, then - reading the piece - the practical concerns of interfacing and modification. A hobbyist magazine ran a full customization feature on the Drumatix, which says something about who owned these things and what they wanted from them. The 606 was cheap enough to open up, common enough to find schematics for, and simple enough that a determined owner could tap into its DIN sync lines. Cook's article walks through a buffer box and the pin assignments on the DIN connector, identifying the run and clock signals - the same sync architecture that ties the 606 to the 303 and the rest of Roland's early-80s line.
Modern Recording (March 1984, p.47) placed the Drumatix in a broader context, with Craig Anderton surveying Roland's compact "Proform" family of low-cost, high-quality devices and noting the company's earlier Dr. Rhythm entry from 1980. The framing is worth repeating: the 606 belongs to a wave of small, affordable Japanese instruments that traded size and price for genuine capability, and reviewers at the time treated it as a serious tool rather than a toy.
The secondhand market of the period reads like its own review. Through the mid-1980s the classifieds in the UK electronic-music press are full of Drumatix listings: boxed examples at £90, a unit with a broken output but a working headphone jack at £75, one with a six-way power supply at £95, another bundled with a TB-303 at £130 for the pair. The range of conditions and the steady turnover say more about how these machines were used than any magazine verdict could. They were bought, gigged, modified, and moved on.
Collectors and repairers today describe the Drumatix as a straightforward machine to keep alive, and the period documentation backs that up: the modification articles and the steady flow of used units with individual-output mods suggest a design that tolerated a soldering iron. The 56 memories, the chain-linking, the DIN sync, and the sub-£200 price are the whole of what Roland promised. The 606 delivered exactly that, no more, and it is still doing it.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.