Do you actually need a 909 plug-in? Roland TR-909 vs Drumazon 2 vs samples

The kick works. The rest of the loop doesn't

Editorial You have a house or techno loop where the kick finally sits right: tuned to the track, short enough to leave the bass some room. On top are 909 closed hats on the off-beats, an open hat, a clap and a ride. Sixteen bars in, it is already wallpaper. Every hat lands at the same moment with the same weight, the ride never breathes, and the only variation is the one you'll get round to drawing in later.

Editorial That is rarely a sound problem. A 909 hat that is played the same way every bar sounds the same every bar, however it was made. What brings a 909 groove to life is mostly programming: swing on some parts and not others, accents that move, flams and rolls into the next phrase, decays that open and close over a breakdown. So the useful question isn't whether software beats samples. It is which of those jobs your samples can't do, and whether either plug-in does them better.

What your samples can already do

Editorial First, separate two very different things that both get called "909 samples". A pre-rendered drum loop has its timing, accents, decays and processing baked into one file. You can chop it and re-warp it, but you are working against it. A folder of one-shots is something else: one hit per file, played by MIDI you wrote, through a sampler you can edit. Most of what follows is about one-shots. If all you have are loops, the gap to a 909 instrument is far wider, and this is the honest case for buying one.

Stock DAW tools cover a lot. In Live 12, Drum Sampler plays one-shots inside a Drum Rack with transpose over plus or minus 48 semitones, an attack, hold and decay envelope, a filter, and velocity routed to the filter, envelope or one of its playback effects. Each Drum Rack pad is a chain that takes its own effects, feeds up to six return chains and can sit in one of sixteen choke groups, which is how an open hat gets cut off by the closed one. Live's groove pool applies timing, randomisation and velocity from a groove file to MIDI clips. In Logic Pro, each pad of a Drum Machine Designer kit you load your own samples onto gets its own channel strip in the mixer.^[1][2][3][4]

Editorial Put together, that is most of a drum machine. Velocity to decay gives you hats that open up on accented steps. Automating the filter on the ride over a breakdown changes its tone during the track. Each pad has its own chain, so the clap gets its own reverb and the kick stays dry. Because it is all MIDI and sampler settings saved with the project, it recalls with the session.

Editorial What one-shots can't do is change what was recorded. A sample is one hit at one setting of someone else's 909. Transpose a sampled kick by repitching and its envelope speeds up or slows down along with its pitch, because pitch and time move together. A sampler's envelope can shorten a decay but can't make it longer than the recording. And if you want every hat lane to loop at its own length, you are building that out of separate clips or tracks. It works. It just gets fiddly to arrange.

Roland's TR-909: when the sequencer is the point

TR-909 Software Rhythm Composer is built around a sequencer lane for every instrument, and each lane has its own last step and its own shuffle. The master Shuffle knob scales those per-instrument settings, so a part set to zero stays straight. Steps can be weak hits, flams (nine types, from zero up to 48 milliseconds) or sub-steps played as duplets, triplets or quadruplets, and a Total Accent row accents everything on a step.^[5][6][7]

Editorial That changes the loop from the top of this page. Set the open hat to 15 steps against a 16-step closed hat and the two drift, landing in a new place each bar until they line up again. Put swing on the hats and the ride, leave the kick and clap straight, and the groove leans without the floor moving. A triplet sub-step on the last hat of the bar is a roll into the next phrase. In a sampler and a DAW you can rebuild every one of those ideas. Here, each one is a single setting.

Patterns are built from eight one-bar variations, A to H, chained by Shift-clicking. MIDI notes 24 to 31 switch between them, so you can arrange a track by playing variation changes from a MIDI clip. Any variation can be dragged into the DAW as MIDI or as audio. Patterns also travel to and from a TR-8S, and a TR-8S or TR-09 can control the plug-in.^[5][7][6]

On sound, Roland stays close to the original panel: tune, attack, decay, snappy, tone and level, plus a Panel view with gain and pan. Gain overdrives the modelled circuitry, and Roland's own quick start calls it "the key to getting big sounds". Roland documents no built-in effects. Instead, a multi-out version sends each instrument to its own sub output, from the bass drum on sub out 1 to the ride on 11, so you mix it in the DAW much as you would a sample kit.^[5][7][8][6]

Editorial That is Roland's version in a sentence: a 909 with a much better sequencer, which leaves the mixing to you. If your problem is the one at the top of this page, it is the more direct answer of the two.

Drumazon 2: when the 909 is the start of the sound

Drumazon 2 starts from the same eleven instruments and keeps going. Every drum has its own strip with low- and high-cut filters, a two-band EQ and a compressor, and can be sent to one of two effect buses. Each bus has five slots drawn from distortion, EQ, delay, reverb, chorus, bitcrusher, dynamics and filter, and the master has a three-band multiband compressor and a limiter. Buses and the master can go to any of 16 stereo outputs. D16 describes all eleven instruments as synthesised, hats and cymbals included.^[9][10]

Editorial That makes it the one for a drum bus that is half the track: a crushed, delayed clap, a distorted ride on its own bus, hats tuned down and gated short. Having synthesised hats and cymbals matters here, because their tune and decay are synthesis controls rather than adjustments to a recording.^[9]

MusicRadar's Andy Jones found the sounds could be pushed well past the usual 909 territory, praised the effects as fantastic and flexible, and wrote that "this is no standard 909 emulation" (Read MusicRadar's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)). CDM's Peter Kirn was most taken with the hats, describing the improved hat emulation as "the part that excites me" (Read CDM's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)). Both reviews are from late 2023.^[11][12]

Its sequencer runs up to 64 steps per pattern, with per-step flams that have their own delay and volume, sub-steps that repeat a step two to four times with a start and end volume, accent velocities and a Global Accent track. A Tap mode records from pads or a keyboard, and a randomiser fills tracks with a density control for each. Host Note mode triggers each of 48 patterns from a MIDI note, and patterns drag out to the DAW as MIDI.^[9][10]

Editorial Sub-steps with start and end volumes are handy: a roll that swells into the drop or dies away after it, without drawing velocities. The limit is length. Length and shuffle are set for the whole pattern. Peter Kirn called the pattern editor "just great", but his only gripe with it was the missing per-part lengths (Read CDM's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)), and elsewhere he found it confusing that there is no overview of which parts go to which effects. If drifting hat lanes are what you are after, Roland has them and Drumazon doesn't.^[12][9]

One more thing to know before you start automating: D16's manual says every parameter is disabled for host automation by default, and not all of them can be automated, so you enable the controls you want to move. Up to three audible trigger outputs, short pulses modelled on the original's trigger outs, can clock external gear.^[9]

Which one sounds more like a 909?

Editorial The published evidence is thinner than the forum arguments. We found no independent review that compares Roland's plug-in and Drumazon 2 directly, and no dedicated review of Roland's TR-909 plug-in at all.

Drumazon 2: Peter Kirn compared it with a DinSync RE-909, a hardware reproduction rather than an original, and wrote that it "holds its own against what I think is the best hardware reproduction", adding that D16 had fully emulated the linear feedback shift register several of the drum parts use (Read CDM's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)). MusicRadar's Andy Jones wrote that it had "kicked out every other drum machine and 909 emulator we use" (Read MusicRadar's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)). Both reviews are from late 2023. CDM's mentions updates up to 2.0.3, and the current version is 2.0.7.^[12][11][13]

Roland: the same MusicRadar review, in its "also consider" box, said "Software 909s don't come more authentic than Roland's own meticulously modelled version" (Read MusicRadar's Drumazon 2 review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)). The 2018 Roland Cloud reviews by MusicRadar's Ronan Macdonald (Read MusicRadar's Roland Cloud review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)) and MusicTech's Andy Jones (Read MusicTech's Roland Cloud review ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)) praised the realism of the Legendary drum machines as a group, but neither assessed the 909 on its own. Press reports at launch said Roland built the original's sample ROM into the plug-in, the way the original hardware made its cymbals (Read MusicRadar's 2018 launch report ↗ (external site, opens in a new tab)).^{[11][14][15][16][6]}

Editorial So there is no knockout either way, and we won't invent one. There is also an awkward point for both: if your sample folder was recorded from a real TR-909, it may be the most authentic 909 you own, at the one setting the recording captured. Choose on the sequencer and the mixer, where the documented differences are real, and use the trials to settle the sound on your own loop.

Samples, Roland or Drumazon?

Editorial Keep your samples if your 909 parts are one-shots in a sampler and the jobs that are missing are swing, accents and tone changes. Those are programming and automation, and your DAW already does them. If the one-shots came from a sample pack, its licence, not the fact that everyone has 909 samples, decides what you can release and whether you can share the kit with anyone else. Read it, and if you can't work out where a sample came from, don't put it on a release.

The small print

• Formats: Roland lists VST3, AU and AAX. D16 lists VST2, VST3, AU and AAX, including 32-bit Windows hosts. Neither lists a standalone version, and D16 says Drumazon 2 needs a host.
• Systems: Roland needs macOS 11 or Windows 10 (64-bit) and an internet connection to authenticate, and doesn't support virtual machines or Boot Camp. D16 lists Mac OS X 10.13 to macOS 26 and Windows 7 or newer.
• Buying: Roland's plug-in is included with Roland Cloud Pro (via Pro Selector) and Ultimate memberships, or sold as a Lifetime Key, which Roland says isn't a subscription and covers future updates on up to five devices. Roland offers a 30-day trial membership. D16 sells Drumazon 2 on its own and in bundles, and offers demo installers without stating their limits. Prices change too often to print here.
• Documentation: Roland's product page gives no version number, and the manual we could read is revision 04 from 2018. Drumazon 2's manual is dated March 2024 and its changelog, which runs to 2.0.7, is undated.^{[6][17][18][5][10][9][13]}

Try this before you buy either

Editorial Take the loop that's bothering you and give it an hour with what you already have. Put the open hat in its own clip and loop it at 15 steps. Apply a groove to the hats and the ride only. Route velocity to decay on the hats and accent a few off-beats. Automate the ride's filter across the breakdown. Put the clap on its own chain with a short reverb. Then write down what you still couldn't do.

Editorial If the list says drifting lanes, per-part swing, flams and quick variations, start Roland's 30-day trial. If it says the kit needs to be crushed, filtered and bussed in ways your channel strips make tedious, try D16's demo. If the list is empty, the drums were never the problem, and the money is better spent elsewhere.^[6][10]