Q: What’s More Fun Than A TR-909 Drum Machine? A: The Massive 9 Foot 909!

Q: What’s better than a Roland TR-909 drum machine?

A: A massive 9 foot TR-909.

The 9 foot 909 was created by audiovisual group RAY (Brendan McCarthy / Sam Healy / Dave Hartmann / James Rutherford). This video captures the first sound test of the 9 Foot 909.

Technical details:

A Roland TD-12 sound module is being used, along with drum triggers, to capture button presses on the 9 foot 909. These are converted to MIDI and this is used to trigger a Roland TR-8.

Here’s a test video for the ‘internals’ of the 9 foot 909:

16 thoughts on “Q: What’s More Fun Than A TR-909 Drum Machine? A: The Massive 9 Foot 909!

      1. Just put real 909s under each of thebuttons, with a rod connecting each big button to the corresponding small button on the 909s. No more latency!

  1. Funny but…. a total V-Drum system for triggering those bottons?
    i-CubeX sensors are a better solution to build that idea… cheaper, modern and also can create, switchers and knobs to work. (and cheaper).

  2. +1 for Marco. They could’ve made large functional buttons and knobs a lot cheaper with plenty of other options. Arduino, raspberry pi, livid brain, pulled apart computer/midi keyboard, or pull apart an 808 and solder wires onto the button/pot terminals. hell, even if they absolutely had to use midi drums, they couldve at least used cheap piezo pads instead of $200+ Roland PD heads that are dual trigger and velocity sensitive…

    All that said, I love gimmicky stuff like this. Would be great seeing this on stage with the giant turntable J5 had at Coachella.

    1. pull apart a 909*

      It might even be possible to wire up 3 x 6″ high 7 seg displays and get a working measure/tempo counter!

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