Looks as though I might be the first confused person to post here in this new design.

Well, I recently purchased and setup my MO8. One of the principal puposes for getting this machine was so that I could compose drums without the hassle involved with older drum machines that I’ve tried to use.

Problems already. There just doesn’t seem to be enough memory available to do this the way that I’m trying to do it.

I enter “Pattern” mode. For “Section A” I set up my first three tracks with the same drum setting - dry drums, or some such - and prepare to record the drum basics on those three different tracks with the intention of panning them later. That works just fine. Then I move to “Section B” to record some variance in the drums for tracks 1-3 again.

By the finish of “Section B” I’m already noticing missing beats and the playback is struggling to shift back and forth between the sections. God forbid I try to record three or four different sections for drums, it can’t even get through two sections.

And this is without adding any piano or any other instruments to the song. Is the MO8 really only set up to function while using their preset drum programs - DR1 through DR4?

All I really want to do is to put together some decent drums out of this thing and record it to my Tascam 2488MKII. Is this just impossible with the MO8? Should I go back to working with my old Alesis drum machine? Is the MO8 worthless if you’re trying to compose original material? Is this just for hitting drum presets and letting keyboard arpeggios do the rest? I’m confused.

You should have no problem recording multiple tracks of drums on the MO series.  If you listen to some of the MO demos you can here full compositions with multiple drums, synths, basses, guitars etc.

Here is a question.  Are you hooked up to anything else ( for example a computer) via MIDI?

If you had some kind of MIDI loop happening it could explain the symptoms you are describing.

You might also want to take a look at the article ( select MO6/8 and the articles in puldown menus on the home page) about Track Voices as you may be embedding program changes into the tracks which would explain the difficulty switching between different Sections.