Kawai R-100

A pad is not one sound

The R-100 arranged its voices in eight banks of three. Each bank belonged to a pad, so changing the selection could put a different sound under the same finger. Tuning and pan could change for individual events, while instrument level and sensitivity helped shape the response to a performance.

The bank arrangement also governed what could sound together. Its three voices could not all play simultaneously, and a following hit could interrupt the previous one. A sequence was therefore a set of decisions about duration as well as timing: which sound should continue, which should give way, and how the next event changes the phrase.

More ways to write a pattern

A player could record in real time or enter steps, then work on timing correction, swing, repetition and the shape of individual instrument parts. Reed admired the control available but found moving between functions slower than on the rival Korg. The generous feature list still had to be reached through the panel.

That distinction survives in any close account of a rhythm machine. The number of things it can do is one part of the story; the sequence of actions required to do them is another. The R-100 invited detailed editing and rewarded learning its particular route through the work.

Out of the box

Reed’s inspection described MIDI In, Out and Thru, clock and tape synchronisation, a trigger output and eight assignable audio outputs. The instrument could participate in a studio system, sending sound toward a mixer and timing information toward other equipment.

The eight audio outputs followed the voice grouping. Their sockets offered a way to separate parts while retaining the relationships imposed by the machine’s banks. A decision made at the pad could therefore travel through the back panel into a different EQ, effect or mixing channel.

The library inside

Kawai’s proposed alternative ROMs promised another complete set of 24 instruments. In May 1987 Simon Trask described replacing the sound library through an internal ZIF socket. He had the list for the first additional set, but not the ROM itself to audition. His account captures an expansion being offered rather than every option already in his hands.

A new library could change what an existing sequence meant: the timing remained while the sounds assigned to it changed. The later R-50e carried this idea into another member of the family with its CP2 library, a distinct model whose familiar appearance concealed a different centre.

An Atari alongside it

Compu-Mates’ DrumDroid brought the R-100 into an Atari ST workflow. The February 1988 review described writing and exchanging patterns with the machine through the computer, adding an alternative editing surface to the instrument already on the desk. The relationship was between two devices, with the software extending the work rather than replacing every front-panel function.

The computer screen belongs in the same history as the pads. One gives the player a view of the pattern; the other supplies a direct physical route into it. DrumDroid records a moment when those approaches could meet through MIDI.

A gate on a record

Jack Dangers gives an unusually specific account of the R-100 on Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Re-Animator (Part 2).” He describes it triggering a noise gate, admitting and cutting other sound according to the rhythm. The instrument’s sequence helped shape the passage of a saxophone performance through the record.

Here the rhythm machine controls more than its own drum library. An event becomes an instruction to another part of the signal path: open now, close again, allow this fragment through. It is a striking use of the timing surface at the centre of the instrument.

Steve Baltes later named the R-100 among the instruments used on Arctic Sunrise’s When Traces End, while Michael Fakesch’s studio inventory places one in another working room. Those accounts add different kinds of afterlife to Dangers’ detailed recording explanation. Together they follow the machine through sounds, control signals and the decisions musicians kept finding inside it.