Kawai R-50

A small black box on a red page

The R-50 arrives in a 1987 photograph as a low, black rectangle on a startling red background. Ten pads sit in two rows under the display, with orange Start and blue Stop buttons at one side. Its plain casing is almost an invitation to underestimate it. Kawai sold this as a less expensive companion to the R-100, yet contemporary reviewers found choices inside it that could change the shape of a whole percussion part.

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The promise was not that every player needed a longer list of sounds. The R-50 held 24 factory voices, 50 preset patterns, 50 user patterns and ten songs. Those numbers only become interesting when the machine is used. A sound could be assigned to a pad, tuned for a particular hit, placed in real time, panned, and made to carry an effect. Ten pads could call up different arrangements of that small library. A pattern could change while it played. The box was compact; the work it invited was not.

r50review; r50second; r50preview87

A cymbal that keeps ringing

Ian Gilby’s contemporary review isolates the R-50’s most legible difference: it could sound eight notes at once, including successive strikes of the same voice while an earlier one continued to decay. A cymbal need not vanish every time the pad was struck again. That is a musical idea a visitor can understand before encountering the words “eight-note polyphony.”

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Tuning made the idea more flexible. A sound could be pitched differently for particular hits, even within the same pattern. Gilby tested multiple tunings of one percussion sound against each other; Paul Colbert found a similar pleasure in differently pitched cymbals. Different tunings produced related notes from the same recording, rather than hundreds of separate factory samples. The variation came from changing the same source, and the distinction is the point.

r50review; r50colbert87

Ten pads, several kits

The pads were not velocity-sensitive under the fingers, though the machine could receive velocity through MIDI. That contrast gives the surface its own character. The player could assemble pad setups, assign a sound and its tuning to a position, and change setups while a pattern ran. Four were preset and eight could be defined by the user, according to the September review. Accents and pad-specific settings supplied other ways to vary a part.

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Real-time recording was a strong suit. A player could loop a pattern, add one part, adjust the timing correction and overdub another. Erase could take out one voice or a particular event. Step entry existed too, but Gilby found it less approachable because the display did not give a complete visual map of the pattern. The available methods asked different things of the musician: playing and correcting could be more approachable than placing every event through the small display.

r50review; r50second

Shaping a part inside the machine

The R-50 had digital gate, delay and flange choices, plus tuning, pan and level settings. The arrangement was not a modern effects plug-in with infinite knobs: the review describes a small set of fixed options, programmed for pad assignments.

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The stereo outputs could carry individually placed sounds, and one assignable individual jack could take a selected drum and its tuned versions out to a separate mixer channel. That is a useful limit. It offered one route for a special treatment without pretending that every voice had its own output.

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Kawai also offered a replacement sound chip and adaptor. The swap could change the available palette while the writing surface remained familiar. It was a hardware option, not an invisible set of extra factory voices already inside every R-50.

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The first room

Roman Flügel remembers the R-50 as part of his first electronic setup around 1987: a Boss KM60 mixer, borrowed Casio CZ-1000 and Tascam four-track cassette machine. It is a first-person recollection of a working room, not an invitation to assign every early Flügel record to the Kawai. The R-50 had a place in the room before it had a legend.

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Octave One give the machine an even sharper companion. Lenny and Lawrence Burden remember buying a Kawai R-50 and a Korg DDD-1 as two used drum machines in their early setup. In their account, the Kawai offered electronic drums; the Korg’s percussion card and finger snaps offered another character. The contrast was a musical choice, and both machines became tools they learned closely.

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The Kawai’s ten pads and overlapping sounds offered one approach; the Korg’s card slots and dynamic strikes offered another. Octave One’s direct account explains why the two instruments made useful companions.

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Not only a first machine

The R-50 appears in later musicians’ equipment accounts as well, including Mirrors’ Lights and Offerings and Franz Scala’s Mondo Della Notte. The references establish equipment use at the scope of the respective accounts. Their sleeves are artwork for those releases, not photographs of the Kawai or proof of a particular R-50 sound within a track.

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The R-50 did not need the status of an era-defining icon to matter. Its appeal was concrete: ten assignable pads, notes that could overlap, sounds that could be pitched into new relationships, and a pattern that could be played, revised and sent out to a room. That is enough to tell a substantial history. The 1987 photograph shows the exact machine; the musicians tell us how small equipment became a way to make something larger.

r50review; r50flugel21; octavehardware17