Hillwood HR2 Super Variation "Super Drum Machine"

The Hillwood HR2 Super Variation is a great little drum machine from the 1970's.. Considered an advanced and good sounding drum machine of it's time, the unit played drum loops with enough variation to not be as repetitive and long enough for fills. The drum loops are stored in a "rom" chip within the unit.
The user changed drum styles with radio push buttons on the front panel. Optionally a foot switch could be used to turn the rhythm machine on and off. There are 5 cancel buttons which allow you to remove unwanted sounds from any of the rhythms giving the user some form of customization. The user can select more than one rhythm button at a time for some random beat making (or, as they say, super variation!).

This small drum machine doesn’t look like much, but in fact it has a good amount of nice features, and is more versatile than one would expect from a preset drum box. This is mainly due to the presence of the five ‘cancel’ buttons; very useful, because so many times you find a great beat, but one of the sounds ruins it…
One of the most interesting and intuitive things about this box is the start/stop control. The metal plate across the top of the machine senses your touch… A gentle touch to start and another to stop, really nice.
The HR-2 also has a digital numerical display that actually writes the bar number, instead of the usual blinking light in other units from the era. This must have been pretty exciting at the time!
It is in fully working and near mint condition, I havent seen another one for sale in almost a decade.

Specifications
Manufacturer Hillwood corp. (Japan)
Date Mid/late seventies (appears in a 1977 catalog)
List price 55,000 yen
Sounds 8 (BD, SD, Cy, low conga, high conga, claves, bongos, tamborine)
Presets 10 (Mambo, Rhumba, Bossa Nova, 5/4 Jazz, March, 3/4 Jazz, Waltz, Rock, Swing, Samba)
Programmable No
Controls
- Balance control
- Cancel buttons for five sounds: low conga, high conga, bongo, claves, tamborine
Outputs 1
Trigger out No
Footswitch Start / Stop (not Included)

It is a 110v unit and a step-down transformer is required for use in UK/EU/AU. Using a high quality transformer is recommended as cheap generic Chinese transformers may damage your machine.

Feel free to contact me for further details and exact shipping costs to your destination.

Demo video coming soon