The Roland MC-707 Groovebox Has An ‘Easter Egg’ Pong Game

There’s a long history of ‘easter eggs’ – hidden images, modes or features in modern technology – and synthesizers and electronic music gear are no exception.

This video, via tarekith, demonstrates the hidden pong game of the Roland MC-707 groovebox.

tarekith notes that the video is a “Quick demo to show how you can access the hidden pong game on the Roland MC707. (psst! enter demo mode and press C1 and C.”

9 thoughts on “The Roland MC-707 Groovebox Has An ‘Easter Egg’ Pong Game

  1. When I dropped $1000 on the MC-707, I wondered if this was the smartest or most stupid thing I had ever spent that much money on. When I opened the box and turned it on, I went down a k-hole of music making from which I did not emerge for hours, deep into the night, and I have been playing it ever since. Then, there was the 1.2 update with even more and last week the 1.3 with even more and now this fantastic Easter Egg on this miserable lonely Easter.

    As schools go online, Roland is giving other synth makers a free online master class in how to build a great synth/groovebox, improve it often with feature requests from the community, and make you want to make music with it.

    I have no where to go all day today and only one thing on my schedule. Today is the day I finally get to Bank B of the drums. $1000 and worth every dollar.

    On this Easter, I offer my prayers and love to those who are hurting now. But let me make one suggestion. If you make music, today is the day to play — not to try to make that hit track or the perfect stem or something to impress someone on Bandcamp or Instagram or SoundCloud, but just play. Forget the clicks and the likes and the downloads and all the rest, just play.

    Today, play. If you love to play, play.

    Happy Easter.

    Play.

    1. > Roland is giving other synth makers a
      > free online master class in how to build a
      > great synth/groovebox

      i disagree. a roland groovebox, worthy of the name, needs to have a SONG MODE. instead they came up with this crappy pattern chain update. remember: korg did the same with their tribes. hey roland, mc-users want SCENE chain, for god´s sake! my akai force has it. so far only in beta, but it works. so to your point; its the opposite. akai/inmusic showed roland and korg how to build a cutting-edge groovebox.

      1. The pattern chain is definitely a kludge and if SONG MODE is your dealbreaker, no deal. But I spent about two hours on Easter just playing drums using the B006 Jazz Kit, the one that sounded almost like an old Gretch set to me. The pads are so responsive and with a 128 step pattern and no quantize, I can create a very natural sounding drum pattern like the acoustic drums on some of those LCD Soundsystem tracks. Then, I went back to shorter lengths like 16 and 32 and started to try to mimic a bunch of different drummers from esoteric players like Leon Parker (kick and snare only) to the standard classics like the riffs from Radar Love and Hot for Teacher. And then I remembered a friend who had learned to play every Joy Division and New Order song you have ever heard on a set of department store drums. He beat the hell out of those drums. I tried to do the same thing — turning the tempo way down, punching the pads hard on the Jazz set, turning the tempo back up, and voila, instant Stephen Morris. Added a little pick bass melody for Hooky up too high on the neck, as always. Ah, happy happy joy joy!

        I guess I am easily amused, but I keep testing this thing to see: Can I do this and can I do that? Some of the things it didn’t do, it does now with the updates.

        No, no SONG MODE. That’s a fact. But I am not a DJ whose performance will fall apart if there is a 2 minute break between songs. I’m just a guy who thinks I’m programming drums for New Order or LCD Soundsystem on a Sunday afternoon…

  2. As an important “historical note”, this is perhaps an homage to the venerable Kurzweil K2000 which also had a hidden pong game (from back in the early 90’s). For sounds, the K2000’s pong game would use whatever samples were assigned to a specific location– so at least theoretically, one could assign Pong® type square waves, or better yet actual samples of ping-pong balls striking paddles. I don’t know if other Kurzweil models kept the pong game intact in later models. But I can remember playing it a few times in bored moments during long sound checks.

  3. thanks for your thoughts 707-anon, i am hoping to get one of these with coronachan stimulus and i am confident it will be one of the last electronic music devices i will ever want to buy – too bad Akai couldn’t get that Force quite right, it still has alot of problems and i just couldn’t like any of the sounds i heard from it

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