Things to do first/early on

Fresh out of the box, a 307 can be bewildering. The manual isn't the clearest, lots of the functions are buried in menus, and the knob labels are heavy on unfamiliar abbreviations. So in this post I'll list a few things that you can try right off to help get a feel for it. (Think of this post as a simpler version of the Quickstart Guide.)

1. The obvious one: Hit play and listen to the preset patterns. Yes, most of them you probably won't like, but they will give you an overview of the 307's raw sounds. (They'll all play at the same BPM if you play them without hitting stop before switching patterns, so they'll likely be slightly easier on the ears if you hit stop each time.) If you want to scroll through them one at a time, use the Value wheel or adjacent Inc/Dec buttons; but if you'd rather skip between them by style & genre, hit the Left/Right buttons in the Cursor section.

2. Some portions of the 307, like the "Stop-Play-Rec" section, make intuitive sense from the get-go; others, not so much. One section of the user interface (UI) that can bring fairly instant gratification is the three buttons labeled "Part Select, Part Mute, Rhythm Mute". I'd get comfy with these early on, as they affect the drum/synth parts (R, 1-7) in fundamental and cool ways, allowing you to create a full-length track from a single pattern if used tastefully. To wit:

-Part Select: Hit it, and then hit one of the eight part buttons. That one alone will light up. Until you choose another one, whatever you do to the seven filter knobs up above (#1-4, LFO depth, Filter Cutoff and Resonance) will affect the sound of that part alone. Tweak away while the pattern plays. Also, playing the keyboard at bottom will sound that part's synth voice (but see #3 below).

-Part Mute: Hit this button and all the parts in a pattern that have something recorded on them will light up. If they're currently muted, they'll light up and also flash. Hitting each part button will mute and unmute it. This includes the R part, which governs all the rhythm (percussion) parts as a group. But if you want to mute, say, just the snare drum, hit...

-Rhythm Mute: ...which is organized the same way as Part Mute, only now you can mute and unmute each of the eight percussion parts individually.

Annoyingly, it's impossible to mute/unmute just some of the percussion parts at the same time that you do synth parts 1-7, but at least there are a couple of tricks available to create drama. One is to mute a couple of parts first, and then hold down the Part Mute button while hitting Part Select. Each time you do this it reverses the muting assignments: Every part that's muted gets unmuted, and vice versa.

3. The white & black buttons along the bottom are set up to function as a piano-style keyboard -- as long as all four buttons under "Pad Select" are dark. Whatever part you've selected with Part Select will sound when you play on these buttons. But if you hit one and hear something other than a single tone (i.e. a long complex riff) or nothing at all happens, check to make sure none of the Pad Select buttons are lit red (which means the 16 buttons are being used for other functions I won't get into here).

4. Certain effects can be set to activate/deactivate with the three-position "Grab" switch right near Knob 4. How to program this switch is of course too complicated to detail here, but you can get a fairly decent intoduction to its capabilities as you go through the preset patterns by toggling it On and Off.

5. A related idea: As you work your way through the preset patterns, try isolating individual parts by muting most or all of the others and then play with the keyboard, knobs, grab switch, etc. to get a better idea of what's happening to that particular part. (I know lots of producers are philosophically opposed to doing anything with presets, and when it comes to live performance, I'm right there with you. But since Roland, in its wisdom, decided to make presets we can't erase, we might as well learn what we can from them.)

6. "Turntable Emulation" over on the right is an easy way to adjust a pattern's tempo and/or overall pitch somewhat, either if you're a DJ who wants to sync the 307 with spinning vinyl or you just like the effect. But if you're a klutz like me, your hand will have a tendency to knock into the slider and move it accidentally, so while you're learning the ropes it might help to hit the Pitch and BPM (beats per minute) buttons to darken them right after you turn on the 307, just to avoid the annoyance.

7. If you've tweaked a pattern beyond recognition and want to get it back to the way it was when you started, switch to another pattern and then switch right back to the original one. But if you like the monster you've created, first save it to one of the 200 User patterns...a good way to start accumulating ideas for your own stuff.

...There! That ought to keep you busy for awhile.