And THEN: Listen close to any replicas to make sure you hear no difference.
808 EMULATOR MAC FULL
But if you really want to know it, I can only encourage you to hear samples of real TR-808s (web is full of it). That was some years ago and I also was in doubt.
I read some of the posts here that have doubts about that story. Unless you’re really after “the” handclap. And if you’re not going for pure nostalgia, you should be able to do better than the 808 anyway. So then the question is, can you get an 808-enough sound that it will work for your audience? The modern remakes, as the OP suggests, will get you there, funny transistors or not.
At least half of the 808’s sound is in the studio rather than in the box, IMO.
The resulting compression and overdrive/distortion is what makes the 808 sound like a monster, and not just a decaying single sine wave with a little punch up front. (“But, but, the Beastie Boys!”) Nope, the trick with an 808 is to record it so hot that it saturates the tape that you’re recording it on. F’rinstance, it has a crappy anemic bass drum. If you’ve ever heard an 808 first-hand, it doesn’t sound at all like an 808. There was no single sound.Īnd don’t get me started on the temperature dependence of the circuitry in an 808! The same machine will sound different six months from now.īut second. The result: cross-machine variation is huge. It was not built for golden-ear studio types, and the QC was done by many different humans on an assembly line. The 808 was built inexpensively, for the bottom end of the market, for bands that were too cheap to hire a drummer. Posted in Musical Hacks, Slider Tagged 2SC828, 808, drum machine, Ikutar Kakehashi, noise, noise circuit, roland, Roland TR-808, TR-808, transistor Post navigationįirst, chasing “the” sound is for suckers. You do have to wonder how you stumble upon the correct trait in an obscure batch of reject parts? Looks like we’ll be adding Ikutar Kakehashi’s book I Believe in Music: Life Experiences and Thoughts on the Future of Electronic Music by the Founder of the Roland Corporation to our reading list. But it was a very different time with a lot fewer components on the market. The film is currently streaming on Amazon Prime (and to rent everywhere else) and is certainly worth your time just to grasp how seminal this drum machine has been in hip hop and several other music genres.įor modern product developers, betting your production on a batch of reject parts is just batty. This is an incredible story that was highlighted in 808, a documentary premiered at SXSW back in 2015. When the parts ran out, production ended as newer processes didn’t produce the same superbly flawed parts. What was left went into the noise circuit that gave the 808 its magical sizzle. A big batch of rejects were sold to Roland back in the 1970’s - which they then thinned out in a mysterious testing process. The little dab of paint on the top of the transistor indicates that it was a very special subset of those rejected parts (the 2SC828-RNZ). But it won’t function the same as the parts found in the original 808. Pictured above is the 2SC828-R, and you can still get this part. As the Secret Life of Synthesizers explains, it was a rejected part picked up and characterized by Roland which delivers this unique auditory thumbprint. That headline sounds suspect, but it is the most succinct way to explain why the Roland TR-808 drum machine has a very distinct, and difficult to replicate noise circuit.