Japanese Synthesizer and drum machine manufacturers like Roland or KORG are not known for good and useful manuals. For this simple reason, Sunshine Jones has reworked a manual once again. This time, he released a complete rewritten and illustrated manual for the Roland Boutique TR-09 drum machine. Everything is explicated very nicely in this new manual with nice illustration and everything you need to understand better the device is inside this new document. Big thanks to Sunshine Jones for this new free release.

This is user’s guide number five – The User’s Guide to the Roland TR-09. I’ve collected all of the information I can about the TR-09 Rhythm Composer and compiled it into a PDF document for you which is in the form, and in the spirit of the original TR-909 manual. I started doing these because the first leaflet style manuals which arrived with my Roland Boutique synths were too small to read, and so abbreviated that I was left feeling a little underwhelmed. I wanted more. So I learned more, and tried a bunch of things and eventually took my notebooks and turned them into the missing manuals for these lovely little things.

I hope they open a world for you, and guide you through the features, and serves you as a reference guide for things you forget, or wonder about. At the end there is both a “patch memo” intended for transcribing your settings for the sounds, as well as a “pattern” memo” which is meant to allow us to transcribe the actual patterns we write. I hope these are useful to you, and make writing beats, and sharing ideas easier, and more fun.

More information here: Sunshine Jones TR-09 manual