Interesting news from Superbooth 2018. Behringer came out with a clone that from some distance looks like the original legendary drum machine. After Roland's boutique edition of TR-808 (TR-08), in a couple of months we will have another (hopefully) cheap option for the 808 experience in the form of Behringer Rhytm Designer 808 (RD808).

This one will raise some eyebrows about how can they do that in the first place? Apparently in the states design patents expire after a number of years, so now everyone can make a legal 808 clone that even looks almost the same

As for the machine itself, its still a prototype, so the guys from Behringer didn't want to expose the sound in detail, cause they are still tweaking it, but they claim that the same circuitry is used as on the original thus it has all the same parameters and should sound pretty much the same.

It also has some new interesting features. First one is the built in analogue filter, high pass and low pass, with resonance, which will come in handy. The second one is called wave designer, and its basically a compressor, trough which you can assign instruments individually, it has two parameters, attack and sustain. Most people will find that useful to give additional boost to the bass drum.

Firmware is still changing so it will maybe give us some more possibilities such as live pattern recording.

Another one cool thing is that it has individual outputs for instruments.

I can imagine that a lot of people will eagerly wait for the official release, while some Roland purists will do some eye rolling.