The 808’s soul
“One of the most revered uses of analogue synthesis is with this: a Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer. It’s basically a whole series of electronic circuits tuned to replicate drum sounds. This was the only technology available at the time, pre-sampling. I don’t think the developers of this machine knew how big it was gonna be… as acoustic drum sounds, they’re not much, although the clap could be considered quite realistic. But the power of these sounds in productions is absolutely legendary.
“There’s been talk over the years of the ‘soul’ of the 808; in other words, it has a sound when running under its own sequencer that can’t be replicated by sampled hits. I totally agree, but with one caveat… I don’t think it’s the sequencer that has the soul; it’s the fact that these sounds are generated by analogue circuits, many using the most perfect form of chaos – noise. The clap and snare share a noise source, so when you play them together, you get an odd degree of phasing.
“Because this uses a noise source, every single sound is slightly different, and that’s what the ‘soul’ of the 808 is all about. Every clap, snare, hi-hat, etc, is different, as it’s all coming from analogue circuits.
“If you only sample one or two hits from the 808, you’re only capturing a still snapshot of the thing in oscillation. The only way to get around this is to use round robin sampling – in other words, sampling multiple hits of the same thing.
“Let’s have a listen to the clap. The TR-808 isn’t a MIDI device, but my one has been retrofitted with MIDI – that doesn’t change the sound at all, though. To highlight the differences of this clap sound, I’ll load a long reverb over this sound. Listen to the reverb tails, and hear how they change with each sound – there’s a tonal difference in the reverb trail of every single clap, and that’s because every one is different.”
Next, James triggers the entire kit via MIDI, and records each element as audio to new channels. “Look at this clap recording – the level and waveform of each hit looks totally different. These snares look quite similar, but when I load a reverb effect onto it, you can again hear tonal differences. This is why this drum machine sounds unique.”
James has kindly provided readers with bespoke round robin kits (in Ableton Sampler, Logic EXS24, Kontakt and Studio One formats), all sampled from his original TR-808 and TR-606 drum machines. Each kit features multiple samples per sound for maximum authenticity. Download these goodies from this issue’s FileSilo – flip to p5 for more.