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#808Day and #WorldCatDay

Today is both 808 Day – after the Roland TR-808 drum machine – and World Cat Day. As a bonus, the date works in both American and international formats. Is there a greater confluence of this blog’s core themes than this date? 😸 🎹

The picture above was from an old Reddit post. We have featured a few cats with the TR-808’s successor, the TR-8, such as this post from 2017, courtesy of adrianhalo on Instagram.

They have a very different look – the TR-8 was part of Roland’s AIRA series with the glowing controls. The sound and technology is also different, but both instruments have found their way into a great variety of music.

CatSynth Pic: Coco and TR-09

Coco gets ready to program her Roland TR-09 drum machine. Submitted by Daniel Warner via our Facebook page.

The TR-09 is a recreation of the Roland TR-909 as part of the Boutique series. It has the original controls and layout of the “909”, but in the Boutique form factor; plus some modern additions like USB.

You can see Coco’s previous appearance on CatSynth here.

CatSynth Pic: Roland JD-Xi

Beautiful white cat with Roland JD-Xi synthesizer. Submitted by André Luiz via our Facebook page.

The JD-Xi is a small affordable synth that includes analog modeling, PCM-based sounds, and a vocoder. It seems in some ways similar to a couple of the Boutique line, though its interface is closer to that of the AIRA line. We at CatSynth are particularly curious about the vocoder features…

CatSynth Video: Drum Machines, MicroBrute, Kaoss Pad and more

This has to be one of the sweetest things we have seen in a long time! From our friend Kamal Sabran via Facebook. We see a young man and young cat, who clearly love one another, playing a drum machine. There is also an Arturia MicroBrute, a Korg Kaoss Pad, and some cool retro devices including a reel-to-reel tape recorder and analog oscilloscope.