ROLAND MC-909

Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Jim Aikin

FIG. 1: With its healthy complement of knobs, sliders, and buttons, Roland's MC-909 sampling workstation is ideal for stage work, and it's easy to use in the studio too.

Some electronic instruments offer instant gratification, but not much depth. Some have features galore, but they're balky and difficult to use in a live setting (or even in the studio). Once in a while, however, a product comes along that sounds great and offers an amazing amount of musical power, while also being so smoothly designed that you could take it onstage and lay into it the way Eric Clapton lays into his guitar.

The Roland MC-909 is just such a device. The flagship of Roland's line of Sampling Grooveboxes, the MC-909 is aimed straight at the dance, R&B, and hip-hop market. Its mouth-watering array of features includes full-featured sampling, a 16-track pattern/song sequencer, a turntable emulation slider, twin D Beam (infrared sensor) hands-free controllers, versatile effects, a USB port for archiving your sonic creations on a computer, and a whole lot more. I didn't have a chance to test the MIDI control of a V-Link-compatible video system, but if synchronized video is part of your live shows, you should check this feature out.

The tone generator is highly programmable, and the sequencer is a quick and effective tool for creating multitrack mixes in the studio. The MC-909 can do just about anything an aspiring producer on a budget might need. It wouldn't be my first choice for recording and editing vocals, but you can even do that if you need to. And it's light enough that you can tuck it under one arm and take it on a gig. Don't be fooled by the relatively modest price tag; the MC-909 is a monster.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

It's obvious a lot of thought went into the front-panel design of the MC-909 (see Fig. 1). The buttons are clearly labeled, and all of the important functions are only one click away, which is ideal for live performance. The big LCD provides lots of useful information. And while the manual is not perfect, basic operations are explained in a clear, step-by-step style. After only a few minutes, I started to feel at home.

The factory patterns are inspiring and show just how radio-ready the MC-909 can sound. A number of dance and hip-hop/R&B styles are represented. There's even some reggae. In addition to 215 multitrack patterns (mostly four or eight bars in length) the unit ships with 440 single-track patterns (drum beats, special effects, and so on), which you can copy into your own patterns or trigger in performance by assigning them to the RPS (Realtime Phrase Sequencer) sets.

FIG. 2: In addition to its USB port, the MC-909's rear panel sports an array of I/O options, including MIDI, analog audio, and coaxial S/PDIF.

You can expand the MC-909's internal memory up to 128 MB with SmartMedia cards, and the sample memory is expandable to 272 MB. Need more? The MC-909 can communicate with your computer via USB (see Fig. 2). You can offload your samples to the computer's hard drive (cheaper than storing them on SmartMedia), and you can update the MC-909 by downloading the latest operating system. The MC-909 won't communicate with Windows 98 machines, but it's ready to go with Windows 2000, ME, and XP, and with Macintosh OS 9 and OS X.

The external audio input on the MC-909 can be used for sampling, and it can also process another signal in real time through the MC-909's effects. The left input can be switched to mic level. Although the rear panel has the usual stereo headphone jack, the MC-909 has no cue mix button, so there's no way to audition its output in your headphones onstage without sending it to the main outs.

The MC-909 is a real musical instrument, not just a studio tool (though you can certainly use it in the studio). It has numerous features that let you change your mix or arrangement without stopping playback: synthesizer knobs and sliders, an interactive mixer with eight sliders and 16 track buttons, two D Beam sensors, a turntable emulation slider, and a bank of 16 Velocity-sensitive pads that can be used for several tasks.

Although the instrument has a song mode, in which patterns are chained together, you could easily play whole live shows using only pattern mode. You can jump to the new pattern of your choice without interrupting playback, switching either at the end of the current pattern or immediately. Individual tracks within the pattern can be muted and unmuted on the fly, making it easy to drop out the kick and add a snare fill, add some chords or a lead line to the mix, and so on.

And that's only the beginning. Let's dive straight into the performance features and then look at the music programming side.

TURNTABLE EMULATION

Located on the right side of the panel, the large Turntable Emulation slider is perfectly positioned to be played with a flick of the fingers. It has a light but easy-to-feel center detent, so you can easily return to normal playback position. You can't actually scratch with the slider, because the 909 can't play sounds backwards. But you can push or pull the pitch or the tempo by itself or do both together. The slider can also be assigned to send Control Change messages such as Modulation and Pitch Bend.

Tapping the dedicated Hold and Push buttons is equivalent to instantly moving the slider to the top or bottom of its travel. These buttons are good for special effects, and can be tapped quickly to line up the MC-909 with a beat coming from a turntable or other non-syncable source. The maximum depth of the slider can be set from ±1 bpm to ±200 bpm. The slider can also be used as a MIDI modulation controller.

ON THE BEAM

The dual D Beam controllers on the MC-909 emit infrared light. When you hold your hand above one of the controllers, the light bounces off your palm and is reflected back. It's then sensed by the D Beam, which lets you change the current sound by waving your hands in the air. The two D Beams are positioned about a foot apart; that's ideal for playing one with each hand.

The D-Beams have four modes of operation: Solo Synth, Cutoff/Resonance, Turntable, and Assignable. The modes are selectable from a front-panel button; each mode has a few parameters that you can edit in advance. The D Beams can be switched on or off individually, but the Mode button affects both.

In Solo Synth mode, the D Beams work together as a sort of theremin. The left one affects the volume of a sustaining tone, and the right one affects its pitch. The D Beams aren't appropriate for playing complex melodies, but at the very least, you're set for that Beach Boys medley. In Cutoff/Resonance mode, the D Beams control the filter cutoff and resonance of the sound being played by the currently selected part. This mode is probably most useful for mainstream dance music effects.

In Turntable mode, the D Beams duplicate the functions of the Turntable Emulation slider; it's showy, but you're not gaining any new functionality. The Assignable mode is more powerful: each D Beam can output all sorts of different data, ranging from MIDI Control Change and Pitch Bend messages to arpeggiator octave transpositions, start/stop (duplicating the functions of the transport Play and Stop buttons), and mute/unmute-all-parts commands. Being able to start and stop the music by waving your hands over the instrument goes beyond showy: it's a little spooky.

PADDED CELL

Positioned along the front edge of the top panel, 16 rubbery-textured pads have various uses for performing and editing. First and foremost, they're a keyboard for triggering whatever sound is assigned to the currently selected part. The pads wouldn't work too well for playing a live lead line, but they're fine for throwing in percussion and chord chops. Octave Up and Down buttons are handily positioned at the left end, as is a Hold button, which performs the same function as a sustain pedal. Most people will probably stand when they use the MC-909 in performance, so not having to horse around with a sustain pedal is an advantage. (In any case, the MC-909 has no sustain pedal input.)

The pads have several uses besides triggering single notes. You can use them to call up the next pattern that you want to hear during playback; simply tap the Pattern Call button in the lower left corner of the panel. You can name and store up to 50 of your own pattern sets, each containing a selection of 16 patterns. The setup parameters for each pattern (track level, track mute/unmute status, and so on) can be different from those stored in the pattern itself. This feature adds another dimension of performance power. For instance, you can use Pattern Call to switch among three or four different mixes for the same pattern. Sadly, your Pattern Call performance can't be recorded into the sequencer.

Having Velocity-sensitive pads is nice. If you prefer a uniform sound, you can set the pads to a fixed Velocity at the global level. When tapped lightly, the pads don't always trigger, and there are no Velocity response curves, so you can't adjust the pads' sensitivity to your touch. The assumption seems to be that you'll be playing loud music and will just want to smack the suckers. Makes sense to me.

Instead of Pattern Call, you may want to hit the RPS button and use the pads to trigger 1-track patterns (bass lines, drum fills, and so forth), which will be layered into the currently playing pattern. If the sequencer is in Play mode, the start time of the RPS pattern can be quantized, so you don't need to worry about rhythmic train wrecks.

You can name and store up to 50 RPS sets, and the MC-909 even has a separate RPS mixer, so you can latch several RPS patterns and then blend them using the sliders. Like normal parts, individual RPS tracks can be retuned in half-steps during playback using the mixer. It wouldn't be very practical to transpose an entire song to a new key using this method, but it works well for turning a drum track into a bunch of low-pitched crashing and crunching noises.

MIXER CONTROLS

All 16 tracks have their own Mute buttons that light up if music is recorded in the track and blink if the track is muted. Because tracks can't be named, it's a good idea to get in the habit of always recording similar sounds in the same track. That's how the factory patterns are set up with the kick drum in 10, snare in 11, and so on. Once you get used to the layout, cutting instruments in and out of the mix is a snap.

Normally, when you switch to a new pattern during playback, the MC-909 mutes and unmutes tracks according to the data stored in the pattern. You can override this setting by tapping the Play button a second time, which activates the Mute Remain feature. When Mute Remain is active, you can segue to a new pattern and retain the existing mute/unmute status of each track.

The MC-909 offers quick shortcuts for muting all tracks, unmuting all tracks, or toggling all muted tracks to unmuted and vice versa. If you've muted all the tracks for a surprise break, it would be nice if you could return to the previous mute setup with a quick command, but you can't. After muting all the tracks, you have to choose between unmuting them all or unmuting single tracks by hand. Fortunately, it's easy to do: press eight buttons at once, and all eight tracks unmute instantly.

ARPEGGIATOR

Programmable arpeggiators are an important resource for dance and electronic styles, and the MC-909 doesn't disappoint in that area. You can program up to 128 of your own arpeggiator patterns. The patterns can be up to 32 steps in length and can include rests, ties, and chords. The details of pattern programming are not too well documented, but after only a couple of minutes of head-scratching I was able to come up with some cool grooves.

Note Velocities are recorded into the arpeggio patterns, and both eighth-note and 16th-note swing are supported. You can set up the instrument so your arpeggios always start on bar lines. Drum sets can be used as a sound source for the arpeggiator, so you can improvise a constantly changing beat just by grabbing a bunch of pads. Also, the Chord Memory feature interacts well with the arpeggiator. Instead of playing chords on the pads, you can create one-finger chords in advance (up to 128 voicings can be stored) and then arpeggiate them.

SAMPLING

FIG. 3: The MC-909's large waveform display offers a variety of tools for trimming and looping samples.

The MC-909 has nearly all of the features you'd hope to see in a hardware sampler, including a nice big waveform display (see Fig. 3). Utilities such as normalizing and truncating are provided. The stock unit has only 16 MB of sample memory, but as mentioned, you can expand it to 272 MB. You can sample external sounds or resample the 909's own audio stream, assign your samples to the performance pads, and use the full array of patch programming features to sculpt the tones.

While resampling a bass track that I had recorded into a pattern, I found a significant bug. When tracks contain recorded knob moves, the knob moves add nasty gargling noises to the sample. Many MC-909 owners will want to record filter sweeps into their tracks, so that isn't good. However, there's not often a reason to resample a pattern, so it's not a deal breaker. I alerted Roland to the problem and was told that it would be fixed in the next operating-system update (which should be available by the time you read this).

If you have a computer, you can load WAV or AIFF files into the MC-909. Keep in mind that computer backup is necessary if you install 256 MB of sample RAM, because the contents of sample RAM are lost when you power down, and the largest SmartMedia card can hold only 128 MB. (Also, because you can't hot-swap SmartMedia, you won't have any backups of your SmartMedia files.)

With either an imported file or one you've sampled, you can use the Auto Chop feature to detect transient peaks the way Propellerhead ReCycle does. You can then assign each hit within the loop (up to a maximum of 16 per loop) to a new rhythm set suitable for recording your own beats. The sample split points located by Auto Chop can be manually edited, and you can audition the edits while you're making them, so there's no guesswork. Not too many hardware samplers are that smart.

SYNTH CONTROLS

The most important tone controls for real-time interaction (filter cutoff and resonance, envelopes, LFO 1 rate and depth, and so on) are all laid out on the left side of the panel. Each synth patch in the MC-909 can use up to four independent tones (such as waveform or filter), so before grabbing the knobs it's important to glance at the Tone Select and Tone Switch buttons. The red LEDs in these buttons tell you which tones you're hearing, and which tones you'll be editing with the knobs. By pressing several Tone Select buttons at once, you can make the knobs active for any combination of tones.

You'll also need to glance at the Part Select/Mute buttons in the Mixer section. In Select mode, only one of these buttons glows. It tells you which of the 16 parts (tracks) the synth knobs are active for. Only one part can be selected at a time; if you need to make sonic changes in several parts at once, you must record the data into the pattern.

FIG. 4: Extensive patch-editing capabilities are provided through the MC-909's front-panel display.

A deeper level of patch editing is available in the LCD (see Fig. 4). Here you can set the modulation depths for two LFOs per tone, edit four rates and five levels (not just ADSR values) for the envelopes, choose Velocity zones for the individual tones, and more. The MC-909 boasts 693 waveforms, several filter modes, and 10 different signal routing structures, with which you can do tricks like put two filters in series on a single tone and ring-modulate two waveforms.

You can even morph between LFO waveforms — a feature I've never seen before. And of course, the LFOs can sync to the master clock. Add the ability to do Velocity crossfades between drum sounds for smooth changes in the snare or hi-hat, and it's clear the MC-909 is one powerful synthesizer.

The chief difference between sound programming in the MC-909 and in a conventional synth is that the effects are programmed and assigned at the level of the pattern or song, not within the individual sound programs. The assumption seems to be that you'll most likely be using the MC-909 multitimbrally to play a number of sounds at once, so assigning effects to individual sound programs would only get confusing.

EFFECTS

The MC-909 has four programmable effects: a reverb, a compressor/EQ, and two multi-effects (labeled MFX). For the multi-effects, you can choose from 38 different algorithms, including chorus, phasing, auto-wah, enhancer, auto-pan, rotary speaker, lo-fi, and a 16-step tempo-based slicer. The distortion and overdrive sound fairly crisp and digital; the algorithms include tone coloring and an amp simulator as parameters, so you can get quite a variety of distorted tones. The reverb is quite rich and smooth, even with long decay times.

The effects can be routed in series or parallel, and each of the 16 parts (tracks) can be sent to any of the four effects inputs or routed dry to the main output. Parts can also be sent to Direct Out 1 or 2, so you can apply external effects if you need to.

Each effect can be switched on or off with its own dedicated front-panel button. There are also three knobs for playing the effects in performance. One of the knobs chooses the effect type, and the other two are assigned to useful parameters. You can switch the knobs from one effect to another without having to open a menu. When they're assigned to the compressor, because there's only one type, the knobs control attack time, release time, and threshold.

Speaking of compressors, the MC-909 also has a mastering multiband compressor. The attack and release knobs are in their own section of the panel, along with a couple of switches. Other controls are tucked away in a page in the LCD. This compressor is global for the instrument, and its settings are not stored with individual patterns or songs. As a way of fattening up the bass, boosting the highs, or giving your mix more presence, it's a great asset.

SEQUENCING

FIG. 5: Creating new patterns is a breeze with the MC-909's simple piano-roll display.

Recording your musical ideas into MC-909 patterns is almost as easy as falling down (see Fig. 5). Patterns can be up to 998 measures long, though for most of us 8 measures is probably plenty. After laying down a part, you can switch to a new track and record another part without interrupting the recording process. If you want to practice a part before recording it, you can go into Rehearsal mode, again without stopping, and then record the part when you're ready.

During real-time recording, drum-machine-style scoop-out erasure is available. You can even switch in and out of Quantize-on-Input mode during recording, so you could get a tight hi-hat track with a loose triplet on one beat, for example. Two step-recording modes are also available.

Patterns can be chained together into songs, and each pattern in the song can have its own track-mute setup, so one pattern can be used in many ways. Song mode is pretty basic, though. Once you've entered a step with some track mutes, you can't go back and edit the mute settings. Songs can't be programmed with tempo changes (though you can use the slider to change the tempo manually during song playback). Variable-length song-section looping, which is useful for live performance, is available but with some restrictions. There's no full-length song track for recording controller sweeps or extended solos.

Pattern editing could be beefed up as well. All edit commands operate on regions defined by bar lines; you can't define regions with bar:beat:tick precision. Although you can erase all of the Control Change, Aftertouch, or Pitch Bend data from a track without affecting the notes, you can't specify one particular Control Change type to erase (filter cutoff, for instance). Fortunately, there's a work-around. Knob moves are always recorded in Overwrite mode, so if you decide you want to get rid of a knob sweep, simply go into Record mode, put the knob where you want it, and leave it there until the end of the pattern is reached.

Each track in each pattern can be assigned to play an internal sound, external MIDI, or both. Because this assignment is done at the pattern level rather than globally, you can easily sequence external synths with the MC-909 and only use them in the patterns where you need them.

PACKS A PUNCH

Overall, I was thoroughly impressed with the MC-909. It sounds great, it's easy to use, and it offers a level of music-making power that only a couple of years ago would have cost three times as much. Sampling, a 64-voice synth, an arpeggiator, a sequencer, USB, digital audio I/O — all that and a pseudo-theremin too!

The sequence-editing area could use a few enhancements, and I'm not too fond of the feel or response of the Velocity Pads, but considering the value of the instrument as a whole, those are minor quibbles. It's especially cool that Roland has a vision of how electronic instruments can be used in performance. Why should turntablists and guitar players have all the fun?

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Jim Aikin writes about music technology for a variety of publications and Web sites. He has been known to bust a move, but only when he gets a pebble in his shoe.

MC-909 Specifications

Analog Inputs	(2) unbalanced ¼" (left input can be switched to mic level)
Analog Outputs	(2) ¼" mix; (4) ¼" direct; (1) ¼" stereo headphone
Digital Audio I/O	(1) optical S/PDIF; (1) coaxial S/PDIF
Other Connectors	MIDI In, Out; USB
Sampling Resolution	16-bit
Sampling Rate	44.1 kHz
Sample RAM	16 MB, expandable to 272 MB
Polyphony	64 notes
Sequencer Tracks	16
Sequencer Resolution	480 ppqn
Song/Pattern Memory	50 songs, 50 steps per song; 655 factory patterns; 200 user patterns, up to 998 measures per pattern
Synthesizer Features	4 tones per patch; 2 LFOs; 3 envelopes; 768 factory patches; 72 factory rhythm sets
Arpeggiator	128 factory presets; 128 user presets; up to 32 steps; 2 levels of 8th- and 16th-note swing, 10 up/down modes
Performance Features	2 D Beam infrared sensors; Turntable Emulation slider; 8 multifunction mixer faders; 16 Velocity-sensitive pads; tap-tempo button
Data Storage	SmartMedia, computer via USB
Computer Operating	Mac OS 9 and OS X;
Systems Supported	Windows 2000, ME, XP
Dimensions	19.4" (W) × 4.5" (H) × 15.0" (D)
Weight	13.25 lb.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

Roland
MC-909
sampling workstation
$1,795

FEATURES	4.0
EASE OF USE	5.0
AUDIO QUALITY	4.0
VALUE	4.5
RATING PRODUCTS FROM 1 TO 5

PROS: Very well-designed panel for interactive performance. User sampling with beat splitting. Large LCD. Good-sounding effects, including multiband mastering compression. Programmable arpeggiator. Computer interface for data storage.

CONS: Touchpads don't respond reliably to light taps. No Undo command. Windows 98 not supported for file archiving with USB. No Tempo track in Song mode.

Manufacturer

Roland Corporation U.S.
tel. (323) 890-3700
Web www.rolandus.com or www.mc-909.com