TR909 Have I Discovered its Secret Ingredient?

Is it just the sounds or something else? What has really made the Roland TR909 a legendary drum machine.

Not this... thats for sure, but maybe it at least adds a little something that tickles your brain more than rock solid MIDI files. Maybe this is why some owners will never let them go and will never be satisfied with anything else?

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[morphoice]

The slight delays cause phase differences which make it sound organic and not super repetitive. That's why, as a plugin developer, I include those subtle nuances in my drum machine plugin. Currently modeling a LinnDrum from my hardware and there are sloppy delays of up to 7ms

[Rompler_Rocco]

I want to go around today playing the two examples to strangers. If they can describe the difference, I'll give them $50. But if someone punches me in the face first, I'll allow myself to purchase a Hydrasynth.

[wylatron]

Yes, that would change perception. Being a bit late on the beat makes things feel laid back. Being a bit early on a beat makes it push and propel the track forward. When you hear people talk about bands being ‘in the pocket’ and ‘groove and feel’ this is what they are talking about.
What a marvellous find, and a window into what makes this machine one of the very most loved world wide❤

[DerDanko]

The discrepancies in timing might help other sounds to come through with their transients. When I finally had sample accurate timing in my DAW, I noticed a lot of transient masking and it took me years to figure out sometimes a track or instrument popped a lot more when moved a smidge later on the timeline to be de-masked by the major sounds like kick, snare and so on. I still do that to this day. Cranking an enveloper or compressor for transients and boosting high mids hit the dynamic roof and still did not allow certain sounds to have their transients audible because of the accurate timing, and so the solution was to not use compression or EQ and instead just slide things a bunch of ticks.

[coolo]

Out of curiosity, I wonder what the machines were clocked from and how that may have affected the relative timing.

Back-in-the-days when I first started making music, we would daisy chain drum machines, particularly using a TR-909, 707, or 727 as the master clock. those units had both MIDI and Roland Sync-24, so we could run the TR-808 and whatever Yamaha or Korg machine all together. Imagine 2 or 3 guys each sitting with a drum machine in their lap, improvising together like a electronic version of a drum circle. Experiencing that at the age of 14 is probably why I'm still obsessed with drum machines to this day.

[kaitlyn__L]

This has validated the way I almost never put anything except kick 100% on the beat when I'm manually sequencing beats. I don't think too hard about it, I just wiggle them around with the left and right arrow keys (while 100% zoomed in) until they sound "right".

[thefishdog]

the original 909 shares stuff in the circuits and stuff phases, its the limitations the engineers had to create a drum machine in a price category back then, they did a good job

[AlexBallMusic]

This is the good stuff. The E-mu SP-1200 is like this. I did an equally nerdy experiment where I played it in from its own clock. I then tempo matched my DAW to the recording and sent the clock back to the SP-1200 and the hits all landed differently on the grid with all sorts of variation and seeming randomness. This is even with a unit that isolates the clock so there's no jitter at play.

I'd heard about it, but it was interesting to confirm it.

Then there's the MicroComposer clocks, which is a whole thing too.

Nerds unite. 🕑🤓

[itsraininfire]

As someone who’s been playing drums professionally for a long time, I was astounded at the difference between the two examples. You aren’t hallucinating at all

[PBHorrorGaming]

Interesting, that is a major difference .

[fullytrapped.]

3:18 you're not hallucinating but you're glowing like the morning sun, got my welding goggles on for this one 😎

[brianlespoir]

Use those audiofiles to create your own quantize settings, I did it with my 808.

[TobyBorrow]

The 707 does a quick catch up flurry every 6 bars. I never noticed it till it was pointed out. It is the nature of the beast to be a little sloppy

[JonMurray]

So many awesome tracks created with that special sauce we never even knew about!

[phtamas]

I don't own a 909 but experimented a lot with adding a very small amount (must not be audibly off grid) of timing randomization to hard quantized electronic drums and it seems to have some psychological effect. Slightly randomized patterns won't sound more "groovy" or "human" at all (in fact they're indistinguishable from their hard quantized counterparts when played only for one measure) but they can be repeated for quite a long time before they start to feel boring, unlike hard quantized ones which need frequent variatons/fills to maintain interest.

[moorestreetfootscraytrucks]

Very interesting 🤔. Brilliant investigation!

[catiecke]

Great video Mr S. I noticed the same thing when I did a comparison between the the TR-09 and an MC-500 triggering the 09. The MC had an undeniable feel to it that was 'all over the place' in Logic. So you're not hallucinating. As far as I understand it, the processor in the MC-500 is from the same lineage as the 909 and the Roland engineers were squeezing everything they could from it. I think it's a really interesting topic.

[tobypitman]

I remember making a load of groove templates for Logic using the MPC300 swing quantise settings back in the late 90's with Recycle. I think I used a 1 sample click to do it so it was pretty accurate. I remember I was quite surprised to see how off grid the timings were for all the percentages like you see here. Stylus RMX has a bunch of Groove Lock quantise setting based on the 909 and MPC all of which have these subtle timing fluctuations.

[kemek]

Back in the day I used a 707 as the master clock for my studio (so I could sync a 303 as well). The timing was all over the place.

[cabeuscalling]

Great observation! I will definitely experiment with timings on my next project 👌