FOCUS: SUBLAB
Layer and tailor 808s with Future Audio Workshop’s hybrid instrument
As you’ve already found out in this month’s Dr Beat (p76), Roland’s TR-808 drum machine has played a seminal role in electronic music. The machine’s bass drum has taken on a life of its own, with today’s producers using the machine’s kick sound – colloquially referred to as an ‘808’ – to occupy a dual role of kick and bass.
Today’s 808s hardly ever come directly from the source hardware, of course. In the search for the ultimate combo of hard-hitting punch and subby sustain, producers regularly layer a tight, sampled kick layer over the top of a longer, chromatically-sequenced sub-bass layer – a fiddly process that requires stacking of multiple sources, fiddly MIDI programming, complex processing chains and parallel routing setups.
Enter Future Audio Workshop’s SubLab, a niche virtual instrument designed specifically for the layering and customisation of rich, weighty 808s. At its heart are three sound sources: a synth oscillator, sampler and the harmonic-generating ‘X-Sub’ oscillator. Dedicated envelopes control amplitude, filtering and pitch; the synth and sampler layers can be fed into a Filter, Distortion module and sidechain-capable Compressor by differing amounts; and the signals are colour-coded for easy spectral analysis. Read our in-depth review (8/10, 273) to get the full spec.
So in this quick tutorial, we’re going to walk you through the creation of a layered 808 by utilising all of SubLab’s features.