NEWS YOU CAN USE: Roland TR-909 drum machine made with HTML5:You can buy a 1980s era Roland TR-909 drum machine on eBay for about $4,000. Or you can just go here.”

I didn’t have the 909 in the 1980s, but I did have a Roland TR-606 and later, a TR-707. The 606 had that thin analog sound of the early Roland drum machines, ala the first three minutes of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” The 707 had digital samples, a sync track, and separate outputs. That meant I could stripe a sync track on one track of my cassette four track, and then have both first generation stereo drums on mix down, and I could run the snare output of the 707 into a Yamaha SPX-90 digital effects processor for that bitchin’ cannon-like gated reverb snare drum sound that was The Law on all popular music recorded in the 1980s. Great stuff for the time for the budding home music recordist.

The HTML version of the 909 linked to above can be programmed in much the same way (the 707 and 909 share similar interfaces), to get a sense of how to program drum beats.