Roland Kicks Off ‘909 Day’ With Serato Collaboration, DJ-808 Controller

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An early announcement in Roland Corporation’s 24-hour, around-the-world live-streaming music festival to celebrate “909 Day,” the company unveiled their new DJ-808 controller, a collaboration with Serato.

The DJ-808 integrates hardware, software, and the TR-S drum sequencer in a single instrument. The controller also has a 4-channel mixer, vocal processing, 2 AIRA link USB ports, and Serato DJ integration.  Other features include a 16-step sequencer, “high quality” mic input with an XLR combo jack, and more.

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Roland-Serato DJ-808 Features at a glance:

  • Roland TR-S drum machine: Built-in Roland TR-S drum machine with 606, 707, 808, 909 kicks, snares, claps and hi-hats.
  • TR-S sequencer: 16 step sequencer with 16 patterns for sequencing the TR-S drum machine and Serato sampler.
  • VT voice transformer: Built-in VT Voice Transformer with Pitch, Formant, Ducking, Reverb and Serato key matching.
  • RGB color pads: Velocity sensitive RGB colour pads for Hot Cues, Loop Rolls, Sampler, Pitch Play, TR-S control and more.
  • Channel FX: 4 high quality integrated Channel FX including Dub Echo, Jet, Noise and Filter.
  • 4-channel digital mixer: Standalone professional 4-channel digital mixer with selectable inputs for 4x PC, 2x Phono/Line and 2x USB/Line.
  • External Instruments: Connect external instruments via MIDI or AIRA Link USB and jam along with Serato DJ.
  • High Quality Audio: 24bit/96kHz audio fidelity.
  • Serato DJ FX: Dedicated control of Serato DJ FX powered by iZotope for each channel, TR-S drum sequencer and external inputs.
  • Ultra-high performance platters: Super low latency platters that come with integrated displays and playback status.
  • Serato Pitch ‘n Time DJ Included: Serato Pitch ’n Time DJ included for Key Sync, Key Shift, Pitch Play mode and Auto Pitch on the VT.
  • Serato DVS Upgrade Ready: Connect turntables or CDJs and control Serato DJ with Serato Control Tone with the purchase of a Serato DVS license.

Pricing and Availability. The DJ-808 controller will be €1499 and available in stores early October. For more information in the meantime, consult the Serato and Roland company websites.

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35 thoughts on “Roland Kicks Off ‘909 Day’ With Serato Collaboration, DJ-808 Controller

    1. They have a ton of products coming today, i’m pretty sure they won’t start with a bang. And the market is wide, not everything will be in your liking.

  1. Mr Rain.
    I completely agree . I hope to see more companies fetching out standalone samplers with 8 outputs as a standard. Lighter weight than the MPC’s etc . I have been using Roland equipment and Akai equipment a long time. I hoped this might have been a sampler. The last thing electronic music needs these days is more percussion tracks as in most clubs, the tracks are empty , with just the cliched percussion and no actual music in them or very little. This continues gimmicks.

  2. My quote a week ago “so guess Roland will not further embark the road of recreating legacy stuff but more going towards the INTEGRATION of Digital/Analog Synth, keys/modular and DJ gear.” seems to be not far off 🙂 It’s clear that the live performance/DJ (sample music dance) market where the money is, though Roland is perhaps entering a red ocean an there is a high switching cost as DJ hardware is tightly linked to the software and investments in have been made. Why it is still caleed “DJ”, There aren’t discs anymore, isn’t it just Sample Jockey-ing (SJ) now ?

    It’s clear music creation is more about marketing and not so much about the sound creation anymore and as such the Roland Marketing dept is pretty smart teaming up with Serato, they both need each other to enter this segment. Which other company covers CV analog,,virtual analog (IMHO ACB is just basically VST software recompiled for a embedded processor/DSP), Synths and DJ gear ? not many. In that regard, Roland covers a full spectrum.

    Further on, there was a statement of a NEW MIDI PROTOCOL because of tight timing. Would be interesting to get some more details about this. Perhaps this is MIDI data integrated into the audio stream for better timing (no standard) and probably based on what they did with USB on the MX1 and the TR8/TB3. But then, do we need more proprietary non-USB audio standard interfaces or will this new protocol become an open standard ?

    Hopefully we see some real breakthrough technologies today.

  3. This is insane, but in a awesome way. No shit this is the complete richie hawtin style all in one controller. All you whyners, its the first product, and this just screams live performance. Not everyone wants to collect 7000 little pieces of kit. No really I can’t get over it. I’m in serious rage over all this ignorance here. A mixer, a tr 8, a vxt effect, a soundcard, a usb hub and a serato controller all in one thing. For 1500?!!! And the peeps be like ‘boring’. This is instatechno and most possibly shitloads of fun, not more not less, but surely not ‘boring’. :rage end

  4. Keep in mind it is not a full Tr-8. Just the Kick, Snare, Claps, and HH.

    No Tom, no conga, and worst of all no cowbell.

  5. Looks good, I hope the midi gets implemented in a software update though so serato allows us to sync other gear with the software through a midi box or something as someone mentioned above! I’d like to still use my ns7ii along with other bits of old gear all running in sync with serato as the master clock

  6. that thing will be 2000 dollars Canadian at the very least before taxes.

    It’s almost 2/3’s the price of an OB-6 here.

    And it looks just like a TR-909 mated with a DJ Controller which people at any major club look at you sideways for dragging out already. For adding some percs and pfff vocoded voices to dj mixes this is really too much.

    Seriously Roland you’re drunk Go home.

  7. roland are in some sort of time warp, they are creating kit for buyers of about a decade ago, Korg seem to have their finger on the pulse, as do Arturia.

    When they do bring someting out thats interesting, the do it all wrong too.

    Roland, very nearly good but mostly sh!te gear.

  8. It’s like everyone had their trigger on the ‘hate it’ button, just waiting for whatever it was to drop.

    Not my bag but looks like a nice machine. Cool that you can sequence the built in drum sounds (yes, only kick/snare/hats/claps but from all of the tr-8 kits and really, live djing…) as well as 32 samples from serato. The voice transformer is what seems totally out of place to me; a seeming gimmick on an otherwise ‘pro’ machine. But what do I know.

  9. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad product, just overpriced for the feature set. Traktor S8 destroys this thing for more than $400 less. I could buy an S8 and a TR-8 to use together for the price of this thing. Again, I don’t want to jump on the hate train, roland has made some great stuff recently, I just never perceived this to be a market for them. The idea of having a sequencer built into an all in one controller is a cool prospect though.

  10. Looks really interesting, loads of potential for a hybrid DJ/live set. Keep it coming Roland and ignore the short sightedness of the keyboard warriors above

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