mystify 909 jacking groove

[regler]

hi, I'm kind of obsessed with old jacking 909 house grooves, I come close, but I'm never really satisfied. I have the d16 emulation, I have samples, I tweaked a lot without the quantisation, I use different swing settings, tried to play them with my padkontrol, but there is something lacking.

When I watch videos from a hardware 909 it seems to have this jacking groove instantly when you turn it on.

I want to understand this beast, of course we can now talk about the standard phrases, try different swing etc. but I want to mystify this. What does the 909 swing do exactly? I guess the decay length of the individual hits is important too. Does the 909 adjust it's release with the tempo?

As far as I know the 909 only has some fixed swing settings, does anybody know a source for simple loops with these fixed settings? I really would like to analyse them.

Oh and feel free to educate me when you have some knowledge regarding the 909. :-)

[coldfuture]

My opinion, after owning a billion hardware drum machines, is that a good portion of the "swing" that makes a groove jack has to do with accents producing dynamics coupled with the natural dynamics that a recorded signal will have off of actual hardware. This is why even a very straight quantized beat on the super accurate MPC-3000 clock will always sound so damned FONKY and the same pattern/samples triggered by a softsampler won't quite nail it.

edit: forgot to mention the 909... the 909 being a champ of nuanced dynamics and volume variations over a very solid kick is exemplary in the aforementioned factors.

[steevio]

theres no mystery to the 909 grooves, they come straight out of the box, dial in your favourite shuffle (swing) bang the accents in the right places and away you go.

but i will always maintain that you cant do it with samples, this is because the 909 is analogue and it has a natural wobble to it.
i've sampled my own 909's sounds and tried to build an identical rhythm and run a comparison test. it just doesnt sound the same.

if you sample a groove from the 909 and examine it in a wave editor, you can see how the beats never fall exactly on the grid, they move around very subtley in a very fluid organic way. i dont know whether the emulations try to mimic this effect, but to me its not the same as the real thing.

[AK]

I don't know if you are aware but some of those really swinging grooves may have been written in 16t time.

If you put the sequencer into triplet time ie: 16t, you get 24 steps per bar and you can get some seriously 'jackin' grooves.

Never used a 909, just aware of this programming method. Might be what you're after or might not but worth trying anyway.

[steevio]

I don't know if you are aware but some of those really swinging grooves may have been written in 16t time.

If you put the sequencer into triplet time ie: 16t, you get 24 steps per bar and you can get some seriously 'jackin' grooves.

Never used a 909, just aware of this programming method. Might be what you're after or might not but worth trying anyway.

the jacking house grooves aren't triplet time, a DJ can't mix them with 4/4.

its a shame not more artists use triplets, ive recorded a few tracks in triplets, but theres not enough tunes around to mix with them,

[AK]

I don't know if you are aware but some of those really swinging grooves may have been written in 16t time.

If you put the sequencer into triplet time ie: 16t, you get 24 steps per bar and you can get some seriously 'jackin' grooves.

Never used a 909, just aware of this programming method. Might be what you're after or might not but worth trying anyway.

the jacking house grooves aren't triplet time, a DJ can't mix them with 4/4.

its a shame not more artists use triplets, ive recorded a few tracks in triplets, but theres not enough tunes around to mix with them,

I've tried it a few times and just feels like a heavy swing to me, I didn't mean the groove as in that almost Glamrock type thing ( katie Perry - I kissed a Girl ) Not that,. Still in 4/4 but using 24 steps per bar, it ends up like a very heavy swing.

Anyway, I have never used a 909 so I have no idea about its sequencer/timing but if you program in 16t and place the kicks 4 to a bar and a basic off beat hat, the programming of the triplets gives it that jackin feel. But I guess it's the same as heavy swing/shuffle.

[steevio]

I don't know if you are aware but some of those really swinging grooves may have been written in 16t time.

If you put the sequencer into triplet time ie: 16t, you get 24 steps per bar and you can get some seriously 'jackin' grooves.

Never used a 909, just aware of this programming method. Might be what you're after or might not but worth trying anyway.

the jacking house grooves aren't triplet time, a DJ can't mix them with 4/4.

its a shame not more artists use triplets, ive recorded a few tracks in triplets, but theres not enough tunes around to mix with them,

I've tried it a few times and just feels like a heavy swing to me, I didn't mean the groove as in that almost Glamrock type thing ( katie Perry - I kissed a Girl ) Not that,. Still in 4/4 but using 24 steps per bar, it ends up like a very heavy swing.

Anyway, I have never used a 909 so I have no idea about its sequencer/timing but if you program in 16t and place the kicks 4 to a bar and a basic off beat hat, the programming of the triplets gives it that jackin feel. But I guess it's the same as heavy swing/shuffle.

it doesnt work like that if you program triplets on a 909, you cant put an off-beat hihat in there because it doesnt fall on a triplet. triplets on a drum machine is different to using a software sequencer, where you can mix triplets and 16ths, with a 909 its one or the other.

[regler]

thanks so far!

steevio:

i've sampled my own 909's sounds and tried to build an identical rhythm and run a comparison test. it just doesnt sound the same.

good to hear that you think that too.

if you sample a groove from the 909 and examine it in a wave editor, you can see how the beats never fall exactly on the grid, they move around very subtley in a very fluid organic way. i dont know whether the emulations try to mimic this effect, but to me its not the same as the real thing.

That's the kind of information I'm looking for. As far as I remember the emulation don't do it. Have you noticed if the length from the individual hits vary too?

I really would like to play some hours with the real thing... hope someday I can afford one.