Roland in their boutique series and it is the TR-09, a perfect little recreation of

the TR-909 drum machine from the 1980's.

Before we get into talking about the specifics of this machine, let's just

cover a couple of things. First of all the TR-909 itself was a classic piece of

hardware made in 1984 and 1985. It began effectively the sound of house and

techno. If you've produced house or techno or even if you listen to it you

will be familiar with the sounds in this machine although a lot of us have had to

use either samples or plugins for a long time. The technology that goes into these

is Roland ACB proprietary technology - which is a component modeling system.

So where as a lot of other virtual analogs will model the waveforms from original

hardware, they actually model the structure of the components of the piece of hardware

and that gives them a better opportunity to create a perfect recreation of it.

Before we get into talking about this machine and how it actually functions I

just want to quickly refer you over to the TR-8 because we've got a bit of a

comparison going on here as the sounds of the TR-909 are also in here.

You'll see this first of all there's a bit of a difference in size. We have a few extra

controls on the TR-8 which you'd expect being a more modern machine. But what we have

on the TR-09 is much more authentic recreation in terms of feel and use.

Of course it is much smaller so they have actually changed a couple of things most

notably the sequencer row here so these are little click buttons rather than the

bigger push buttons on the TR-909 but that's exactly what you'd expect on a

smaller machine. To the TR-09 itself now. So on the front panel like I said we've

pretty much got everything you'd expect to find on a TR-909. I'll just run you quickly

through it. We've got stop-and-start controls here. We've got a few controls

here we can control the parameters pretty much of the sequence and more

than anything else and we can also select instruments and we've got a shift

which gives us the secondary functions that you can see under this row of

buttons. In terms of the instruments we have exactly what you'd find on the

TR-909 - bass, snare, three toms,

rimshot, clap, closed and open hi-hats, crash cymbal and ride cymbal.

The sequencer of course looks exactly the same as well and even this row of

controls along the top is almost exactly what you'll find on a TR-909.

There's a couple of small differences there.

Below here is your enter key and your total accent control which i'm going to show

you how all of this works.

That's having a look at the actual physical functions on the front panel.

What we have going on the back we've got MIDI in-out here, we've also got your mix in's

so you can send other signals through the machine if you want to actually run

everything into it or one other thing into and out to your sound system

rather than having to use a mixer you can do that. We've got two outputs so

this is your main output and your phones, then your volume control,

your power for this units delivered from micro USB - you can connect it to a

computer or if you have a power adapter that takes USB you can use it with that too.

It's also battery-powered, also has a built-in speaker as well if you're not

actually connected to anything. The sound so great if you're traveling and you

just wanted to make some patterns while you're on the road then this is the

perfect thing for doing that.

There are a couple of other things that you'll find on this machine that is not on a TR-909.

First of all we have a compressor, so we can hit the compressor button there

and then we can dial in the amount of compression that we want.

And I'll show you what that sounds like a little bit later.

And the second one is this trigger out. So on the TR-909 there was a trigger out which was based

of the rim shot. So whatever was programmed there would send out trigger pulses

which you could use trigger other pieces of hardware.

On here we actually have a distinct trigger out in itself. So even though it's located up here

we can actually program in our own trigger out pattern that will be sent from that port

which again I'll show you when we get in to actually programming.

Let's now play something - we've got four tracks that we can play.

So what these are is a sequence of patterns, I'll again come back to that a little bit later.

Then we have three pattern groups and inside each one of those we have 16 patterns.

Which are triggered using the buttons along the bottom. Let's just get something playing.

There's a lot of patterns built in already of coarse. This is the kind of machine you're

gonna be programming your own. So if you need to do that you can actually overwrite the ones that are already in there.

Although there are a lot of slots there, I think you have 96 patterns in total.

Let's play something now. So what I'm going to do first of all I'm going to select

my bank group and pattern. So well go shift - and you'll see as well we have the little orange box

there that denotes that what we are going to be doing when we press these buttons is effect

what we can see here, so shift - first of all I'm going to jump over to bank one

where we've got some preset patterns in there. This is the kind of machine that you're going to program

program you own anyway, but they've got some in there anyway you can overwrite if you want.

Next thing I need to do is make sure I'm in a pattern group. So we've got one, two and three.

And then I can choose any one of the 16 pads. For a total of 96 patterns that we can have in here.

Which is plenty for anybody. So I'm on pattern group one.

and I'm on my first patch here so all I need to do is hit play.

So what I'm noticing now is we're actually in track mode so we're actually running through a sequence of bars.

If you don't want to be in track mode just hit pattern play one. And then we're just going to play a single pattern.

So off we go, and I can change what that pattern is just by hitting the button's along here and

they'll trigger after a bar finishes.

And like I said these are all built in already but there overwrite-able.

So while we've got this going lets just have a quick check of that compressor. So I'm going to

jump into compressor mode.

So it's actually quite a subtle compression, you don't really sort of notice a lot until you give

the bass drum a bit more.

And then you'll sort of notice as I turn it down it drops a bit of level.

So that's the compressor. Let's have a look at the actual controls of each of the instruments now.

So exactly the same as whats on the TR-8 so there's no real difference here.

On your kick drum you've got tune control.

What i'll do is actually turn these down.

So here's your kick drum.

We can tune it in. You've got your decay control and you attack.

Next one over's the snare drum.

You've got control over the tune. You can also control the tone and the snap on it.

And if you've used 909 sample packs before or one shot samples you'll appreciate the beauty

of being able to actually dial this in rather than having to work through a whole sequence of samples to find the perfect snare.

Next up let's move over to the toms.

I think we've actually only got the low end and the mid programmed into this pattern.

We don't have a lot of control on these. These your tune,

and your decay.

Then we'll move over next to the rimshot

On this one you only have a basic level control.

Then we've got our hi-hats probably the most distinctive sound of the tr-909 is

that open hi-hat we know from everywhere.

Here's the clap again one of those characteristics sounds that we all know.

The ride cymbal there and there's a crash cymbal on here.

There is something really important to be said here which is if we look over at the TR-8

again we have some extra controls on here that we don't see on the TR-09

And that is basically because the TR-909 did not have them.

But, the folks at Roland have put in those extra controls through your menu system.

And the way we do that we're going to go shift and then you'll see down here

we're on the compressor button we've got edit what your first notice here is we

have three parameters so we can affect the gain which is great if you find say

for example the clap on this is quite loud if you want to move that knob

totally from the bottom to the top then you could turn down the gain of that

particular instrument to give you that ability.

The second thing we can do is to tune instruments. So again if we look back

over here the TR-8 we have tune on the rim shot for example. So we can now do

that to the rim shot here which only on this machine has a level control. What

I'm going to do is just bring up the rim shot by itself. So i'm going to select

tune. I'm going to tell it I want to control the rim shot.

And there it is, we can tune that rim shot. We can go - if we get back down to zero

we can go negative as well.

So you can really set that wherever you want it. I'm now going to

jump back into that edit mode again. This time i'm going to select decay or hit

enter then I choose my instrument which in this case is going to be my ride

cymbal. Now we've got the ride selected we're at a hundred percent at the moment

I'm going to turn up my ride

and then what I can now do is start turning this decay time down.

So there's a couple more button presses to get these things than what you have on the

TR-8 but it's all still in there so you're not really losing anything by

working on the TR-09 by comparison.

Alright so that's basically the instruments that are in there. That shows you the sounds.

Let's now take a look at how you would sequence a pattern. What I'm going to

do here we'll get out of this right back to the beginning here. First thing I

probably want to do is set my tempo. You've got tempo control right

here if you want to actually get more detailed than one beat per minute. You

hold down shift and then this gives you increments of a hundreth so you

so you have plenty of fine control over it if you're needing to try and synch this with

something else. Now we've looked at all the things that are on here let's look

at writing a pattern so first thing we're going to do is select a pattern.

So I'm going to go shift. I'll actually go over to the second bank so now I'm in

bank two. Let's stick with pattern write group one. So I'm going to hold down

shift - when I hit this will start flashing. So now we're in pattern write

mode. Now there's already a pattern in here but quickly before I move on to

show you how to put a pattern let's just have a look at the scale button here.

So what I can do with this you can see I'm basically changing what each

step represents. Sort of a triplet pattern. Most of the time you'd probably

be working in this mode which is just your standard four steps per beat.

So let's stop this what I'm going to do now is clear this pattern so we've got

something completely blank. So we'll clear that now when I hit start nothing's there.

And bear in mind what I'm showing you here is exactly how the TR-909 would

have been programmed as well there's effectively no difference.

So first thing I need to do is select my instrument. So you notice that a lot of

the instruments most of them actually have two buttons per instrument and in

this particular way of programming all you need to do is use one of them.

We'll hold down instrument select. I can actually select either one of those and

it'll be the bass drum programmed in. Before you can start programming the

pattern so i'm looking at i'm in pattern number one as well I could have chosen

any of these and it it would have still worked. So i'm going to hit play

once we start seeing the light chasing across the steps now we're actually

ready to program. So again I can hold down instrument select at any point it will

show me what instrument I've got programmed. So the first thing

we notice here is the level i'm getting out of this is not what I had before

with the inbuilt patterns and that is because there are actually two volumes of step

we can use on the bass drum, snare drum, the toms and the closed hi-hat only. We

actually have two different volumes so I'm gonna hit this again

now we'll get full volume on these steps and in the options you can actually

change the order this work so you can have it so that the first press gives

you the full volume and the second press will give you half volume so here's our

kick drum. At this point you know you you can dial things in you can tune this

and adjust your levels, shape the drum.

Next I'm going to do is enter the the traditional, I suppose hihat pattern so

what I'm probably going to do is first of all is just drop all of these on.

Get some of this.

If anyone's familiar with Jeff Mills you sort of start to

recognize that these are the sort of things he does. You got your decay control. Now what