Okay… I’m sorry but I will say this again. I’ve used the real vintage drum machines as I was fortunate enough to have wealthy friends. For me (personally) the charm of the 909 was not the sounds (I actually am not too fond of the CH OH or RC for these I much preferred the sizzling sound of the 808) but the intuitive interface. What made the 909 wicked for me was the ability to place accented notes with a single key in record mode (you didn’t need a separate accent track for some of the hits). This way, you hear the pattern being played and the accented hits (accented) right away vs when the pattern loops after step 16. This was pretty cool, and a very quick and efficient way to get grooves going. As you were keying in the drum sounds in record mode, you knew exactly what the pattern would sound like when it looped)
Moritz made a template, with the machinedrum, that does just this. It is an absolute joy to play with it, as you’re getting the 909 interface experience, but you’re not limited to the sounds of the 909… please try this out… it is so much fun… and if you’ve got an MDUW, there’s no further investment required (unless you actually want to buy some 909 samples). Furthermore, with the machinedrum you have an endless amount of parameters that the real 909 didn’t have, the ability to swing certain machines and not others, the ability to pitch bend all of the drum hits etc…
The only advantage the real 909 had for me was instant access to adjust the various parameters with single function pots… I sort of faked this with the MDUW by using a control 8P parameter, to adjust the most common things I wanted to tweak while recording in real time. So what I did (personally) was use Moritz’s template… loose one of the tom tracks (which freed up 2 machines) use one of the machines to create an accented CH, and the other machine for a control 8P machine). What I often used for the control 8P machine was RC pitch, RS pitch, CH decay, OH decay - - the remaining 4 may have been used for volume level setings for things like SD rolls for fills etc…)
Here’s a clip from Moritz’s post describing the layout
[font=Calibri","sans-serif]“Basically, I read the TR-909’s manual, was convinced that the track layout is very useful and then thought about how this could be translated to the MD. On the TR-909, the main instruments get two buttons each, one with accent, one without: Kick accent, Kick no accent, snare accent, snare no accent, low tom accent, low tom no accent, mid tom accent …, and then rimshot, clap, hihats. This concept is a lot more useful than the MD’s accent concept! But due to the MD’s flexibility, it can be realized with layered sounds.
So here it comes:
Track number, instrument type, mute position, trig position, panning
1, BD (in my case a midi machine, jomox mbase), - , 2, 0
2, BD (hp-filtered), - , - , 0
3, SD, - , 4 , 0
4, SD, - , - , 0
5, LT, - , 6 , -15
6, LT, - , - , -15
7, MT, - , 8 , -5
8, MT, - , - , +5
9, HT, - , 10 , +15
10, HT, - , - , +15
11, RS, - , - , 0
12, CP, - , - , 0
13, CH, 14, - , -7
14, OH, - , - , -7
15, RC, 14 (ok this deviates from the 909, but sounds nicer), - , +5
16, CC, - , - , +10
Try it out, it’s really easy to enter new grooves with nice sound variations, even in Classic mode!
If 2-3 tracks are needed for other purposes, I’d recommend using tracks 7-8, 16." (Moritz post from the Elektronauts site)