Not sure about the mc909, but I've used both hard and soft (oo er!), and I know people who swear by both, so it's a question of taste really. you can get good results either way. If you definately want hardware I would go for something like an akai mpc coupled with a good synth from roland or novation. Where the pc would come in handy here is recording your tune into soundforge or t-racks and then applying some compression and eq to finish it off...but equally you could just dump it onto dat. I'm not the most experienced person however as I 've only released one tune, but there's my two pennies!