909 Day – Behringer reveal the RD-909 Rhythm Designer
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Without even the tiniest ripple of surprise Behringer announce their TR-909 clone, the RD-909 Rhythm Designer, on 909 Day.
RD-909
Honestly, I’m glad someone pulled something out of the bag on 909 Day. I think we might have to give the whole 808 and 909 Day thing a rest, it’s become loaded with unhelpful expectations. Roland seems to agree and have announced that they have something to launch on the 13th of September which has no significance at all as far as I can tell.
The RD-909 looks like a vaguely faithful reproduction of the arguably not-quite-as-classic-as-the-808 909 drum machine. They’ve added the Analog Filter and Wave Designer that we saw on the RD-808. Sadly it doesn’t have the mechanical keys of the original – they’ve opted for little buttons. Actually, many of the buttons have a distinctive Arturia vibe about them. And they’ve lost the orange motifs. It looks quite small in the original image but not so much when you add some context, like the rear panel as in this photo from Knobcon:
Behringer RD-909 · Source: Sylvester Moller
Despite what you may have read there have not been any official features listed by Behringer. All we have is what’s on this prototypes front panel. And judging by some of the handwritten labels they are undecided on a couple of things like Hi-Hat tuning and “Drive” and “Pitch” on the Bass Drum. There does appear to be 64 steps, 12 patterns with 4 intro/fills, swing, flam and randomisation. So we will have to wait and see on what this machine can do.
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