It's the first Roland drum machine with true analog voices in over forty years. A premium play in the age of the cheap plugin and the affordable clone.
On October 1, 2025, in Los Angeles, Roland unveiled the TR-1000 Rhythm Creator: its first drum machine with genuine analog circuitry since the fabled TR-909. The price —$2,699.99— is as much a spec sheet as a statement.
Forty years later
Roland hadn't built a drum machine with true analog voices since the 808 and 909, the two instruments that defined the sound of dance music. The TR-1000 breaks that silence: its analog engine recreates, from the original designs, sixteen of the most coveted circuits from those machines, and adds twenty-one "circuit-bent" models in its ACB technology, FM percussion, virtual-analog synthesis and a PCM library. It's not just a tribute: it carries 64 GB of memory, a curated collection of some 2,000 samples with 46 GB free for the user, stereo sampling and resampling, time-stretch and non-destructive slice editing.
Why now
The move lands at the worst apparent moment. The past decade democratized Roland's sound: Behringer clones and software emulations put the 808 and 909 within anyone's reach for a fraction of the price. Roland didn't respond by going cheaper, but by raising the stakes toward what a plugin can't offer: genuine analog circuits, a new filter inspired by the company's vintage OTA designs, and an integrated workflow that fuses analog with modern sampling.
"The first Roland drum machine in over forty years to feature true analog voices." —Official Roland press release, Los Angeles, October 1, 2025
What can't quite be cloned
The market split in two. On one side, whoever wants the sound and gets it cheap in a clone or a plugin. On the other, whoever wants the object: the gesture of moving an analog fader, the physical limit that forces a decision. The TR-1000 doesn't compete on price; it competes on the experience of working with the machine, betting there's still a band of producers willing to pay for exactly that.
And that bet says something about the state of music production. A laptop holds everything, and precisely because it holds everything, nothing forces a choice. The return of expensive hardware isn't nostalgia: it's a search for friction, for limits that hand decisions back to the process, for a body facing a surface that responds. Roland isn't selling a drum machine. It's selling the idea that constraint —not infinite possibility— is what makes a sound unmistakable.
In the age of the all-possible, Roland is betting that what an artist values isn't more options, but having to choose.