Grid-909

Grid 909 — Product Description (v1.1.1)

Picture a living preset bank, one that stores not just sounds but patterns. Ready-to-play 909 grooves you can combine, take apart, and develop further in seconds. That's Grid 909.

440 Pattern Sets. 22 Genres. One click.

Grid 909 ships with 440 ready-made drum pattern sets across 22 genres: House, Techno, Electro, Trance, Breakbeat, Acid House, R&B, UK Garage, and many more. Each genre delivers 20 patterns per drum instrument, all built by the rules that define the genre. Four-on-the-floor kick for House, industrial mechanics for Techno, syncopated broken beats for Breakbeat. Genre-authentic, not randomly thrown together.

Instead of staring at an empty grid, you hit Generate and you've got a working groove. From there you decide what stays and what changes.

The key trick: each of the 11 drum tracks has its own Generate button. Kick is locked in, snare feels right, but the closed hi-hat needs something else? One click. Only that track gets a new pattern from the library, the rest stays untouched. In minutes you build a combination that doesn't exist anywhere in the library one-to-one, but still sounds like someone made it who knows what they're doing.

Few knobs. Real impact.

Shuffle is bipolar, -50% to +50%, global or per drum track. That means kick behind the grid, hi-hat in front, snare straight. Anyone who's ever tried to program that pocket by hand in a DAW knows what that's worth.

Velocity is edited directly in the grid with a drag up or down. No menu, no popup. The downbeat boost is already factored in. Steps on the one, three, and the quarter notes automatically get a bit more weight, which makes the groove sit deeper without you having to touch anything.

On top of that, you get fill patterns per genre, a snapshot system for saving full pattern states, and up to 64 undo steps. If you tear a groove apart and can't find your way back: no problem.

One length per drum. Polyrhythms included.

Every drum row gets its own LEN knob, 1 to 64 steps. Set the kick to 16, the snare to 9, the closed hat to 3, and you're not writing a pattern anymore. You're writing a polyrhythmic constellation that drifts across multiple bars and only realigns when the math says so. The playhead in each row follows its own cycle length and no longer snaps back at every bar end. What you see is exactly what you hear.

Click the LEN knob and you're back to 16. If you don't need the feature, you won't even notice it. Once you've used it, you know no classic step sequencer delivers it like this.

Not just for 909 sounds.

Grid 909 outputs MIDI only. No audio, no built-in sound. Which means it talks to every drum machine, every sampler, every plugin drummer that understands MIDI.

The MIDI mapping is right there in the Settings tab. Ready-made presets for Bitwig V9 Pro, Audiorealism ADM1x, D16 Drumazon 2, and Roland Cloud TR-909 are included. Using a different plugin? Pick Custom and enter the MIDI notes yourself. Each of the 11 drum tracks also gets its own MIDI channel, so if you want to drive multiple drum plugins in parallel or need complex routing, you've got full freedom.

Custom mappings aren't a dead end: save them as named Custom Kits and recall them from the dropdown whenever you need them. Save, Rename, Delete, right next to the Machine selector. Kits are stored as JSON in your user folder and travel with you across projects.

Bring patterns in, take them out.

MIDI import via drag and drop: pull a .mid file from your DAW or your hard drive into the plugin, and the notes land quantized in the grid. When you're done, drag the Drag-MIDI button straight into your DAW. Finished MIDI file, shuffle baked in, all muted tracks excluded.

Multi-bar patterns up to 16 bars, page navigation with auto-follow playhead, per-drum Solo and Mute, a lock system that excludes individual tracks or whole pages from generation. It's all there.

Who it's for.

For anyone who'd rather make creative decisions when programming drums than place every step by hand. For producers who need a working groove fast and then want to step in surgically. And for everyone who already knows: the sound is in the groove, not in the samples.

Try Before You Buy.

The demo runs with full functionality. Three launches, after which MIDI gets muted briefly every 30 seconds. After three launches the demo expires. Enter your license key in the Settings tab, and that's it.

Formats: VST3, AU, Standalone Systems: macOS 11.0+ (Universal Binary, native on Apple Silicon), Windows 10+, Linux (x86_64).

Demo: € 0.00 Full version: € 19 incl. 19% VAT.