I recently purchased and have been using both the Korg KR-55 and KR-55b on some new Anjelicas Baby tracks. I really enjoyed the practical use and retro sound of these two machines. If you like electronic, electronic, new wave, electro, synthpop, dance or pop music in general, you will love adding these sounds to your music productions.
Manufactured in (1982), the Korg KR-55b was the successor to the popular (1979) Korg KR-55. Korg was one of the companies at the forefront of analog technology when everyone was trying to recreate the sound of a real drum kit. For its time it was revolutionary and very easy to operate. It had double the 48 assigned drum programs of the KR-55 with a handy switch for changing the swing time on some of the selected patterns. However, on the KR-55 all patterns could use this swing feature as the new machine had now routed the switch to access the new bank of 48 preset drum patterns. Also, the drum patterns weren’t identical to the original KR-55 with simply a new set of 48 programs added for good measure. For some this may be disappointing. For others, this expanded the patterns of an otherwise limited preset drum pattern arrangement. Obviously, one would need to own both drum machines to accomplish this.
Interestingly, it could be used as a trigger device for other Korg synths like the Korg Delta. It had a footswitch jack on the back for plugging in a footswitch to stop and start the drum machine and insert drum fills in live performance. The peddler came with the original unit as standard as I recall. He even had six knobs to control drum volumes.
It was comparable in many ways to the Roland TR808 analog drum machine in terms of its thick kick drum and electro like hi hats and snare etc. So why didn’t it stand the test of time like the Roland TR808 has?
Well, both drum machines suffered in the mid-1980s due to the overriding desire of artists to use the extremely fashionable at the time digitally sampled sounds of actual drum kits offered by, say, the Fairlight Music Computer.
What may have saved the Roland TR808, however, was the heavy use of the drum machine by then-new hip-hop and electro artists in the US, particularly New York.
Also, most damaging to the Korg KR-55 and KR-55b was the fact that the drum machine was preset and could not be programmed. It played in mono and didn’t have separate outputs for each individual drum and didn’t have any midi implementation.
Despite its drawbacks, it has had cult status. Many believe that Depeche Mode used the KR-55 on their first album Speak and Spell. To my ears, I suspect this is true. Also, they are quite rare these days and are an interesting alternative to the over-the-top TR808 and with modern computers, drum sounds and rhythms can be easily recorded and edited in software packages like Cubase or Logic. You can even get retro settings to increase the number of outputs the drum machine has. They can be brought in for around £150 or lets say $200-300. It’s pretty cheap considering what you can do with it once you implement it in a modern studio environment.