Beatbox: A Drum Machine Obsession | Hacker News Reader

Beatbox: A Drum Machine Obsession

slate.com

25 pointsrpm432130 comments

I taught myself to do serious programming writing a drum sequencer for windows, back in 1994'ish. I was living and consorting with a bunch of techno producers, as well as being pretty deep in the underground rave scene. I'd spend hours in their studios and wanted to make my own music but couldn't afford the much coveted 808/909, so I spent countless nights replicating it.

I put out a couple of records using it. It also, inadvertently, lead to me getting a call from Richie Hawtin asking me to write audio DJ software for him. I told him it couldn't be done with current hardware, and I think I was probably right (this was 286/386 era). You couldn't put two sound cards in a system, so the output would have been mono. Maybe I was wrong. I'm not so sure.

http://www.sonicspot.com/tekknobox/tekknobox.html

Yes, the UI is hideous, but Windows 3.11 baby!

Edit: The follow up was called Alien Disko Systems 3000.

http://www.sonicspot.com/aliendiskosystems/aliendiskosystems...

It's not hideous, it's vintage! Not as vintage as trackers though :)

Tekknobox was excellent and I spent countless hours with it, major props for providing the only trigger sequencer available at the time and enabling me to sidestep Cakewalk and their ilk forever to this day. I see both Ableton Live and Fruityloops as owing enormous debts of gratitude for your work.

http://imgur.com/rsdbIfR

The internet constantly amazes me.

Thanks!

Related: Cubase 64, one of my favorite demos ever :)

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=artEQkifGG0&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...

>You couldn't put two sound cards in a system, so the output would have been mono. Maybe I was wrong. I'm not so sure.

Huh? Nothing says you have to have two soundcards to get stereo (or multi channel for that matter) output.

And already in the 386 era were apps and soundcards offering more than mono.

For DJing electronic music you typically want to have two stereo output pairs so that you can hear what you are cross-fading into. I don't know of any soundcards from the mid-90s that did that

Two stereo outputs. Somethign about IRQ sharing disallowed more than one soundblaster or gravis ultrasound in a system at one time.

IIRC. YMMV.

The TR-808 is a fascinating example of triumphant failure. The machine was supposed to emulate real drum sounds, but the limitations of the hardware meant that it was absolutely terrible at that task. The 808 kick is little more than a sine wave, the snare little more than a burst of white noise. The sound generators were designed to be the cheapest, simplest possible circuits that bore any sort of resemblance to a drum sound.

I think it is this electronic purity that has made these sounds so iconic - the sounds are the most natural, elegant ways of generating percussive sounds with analog hardware. Later digital drum machines did a much better job of sounding like real drums, but in doing so often merely sounded ersatz. The 808 is a joy because in failing so catastrophically to be an imitation of something else, it is authentically electronic.

Fascinating explanation. Thank you for introducing me to the concept of a "triumphant failure"--I wonder whether there's a wiki somewhere listing other famous examples?

However, I think you may be slightly mythologizing this machine. After all, the 808 wasn't designed with emulating real drum sounds as its primary goal--the Linn LM-1 drum machine, which was released a few months before the 808, literally emulated drums via digital samples of recorded drums. The 808 was designed to give musicians a cheap, flexible means of creating demos via the standard analog synthesis that was popular at the time.

With that being said, I think a more probable reason for its lasting popularity has less to do with the machine's ability to capture the essence of percussion and more to do with circumstance: the 808 was affordable ($1,195 versus $5,000 for the Linn LM-1) to the historically impoverished youth who birthed the global cultural/musical phenomenon we know as hip-hop.

sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_TR-808, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop

> (a mint-condition 808, for $250)

This is the thing often missed by various clones. The Roland machines were cheap, often thought of as limited. An 808 clone selling at $1,000 is a weird idea.

I was hoping that the RPi or Arduino would open up cheap great interfaces to good software, but it hasn't really happened yet.

Personally I can't stand software.

I'd rather have real kit simply because there is a maintenance overhead for supporting software based solutions. Embedded systems i.e workstations are probably a good midpoint. You can just sit down and play shit then.

However, $1000 for 808 clones is batshit.

I paid less than half that for my Triton Studio which emulates an 808 pretty much spot on with about 20 mins work.

I'm curious if you make that statement having played 808s in real life (and my assumption is the answer's no).

I've got analog synths, digital synths, and soft synths. My $40 Korg Monotron is more expressive than my $700 1997 Access Virus. But the Animoog iPad app trumps them both ($40, and I think I got it for $5 because I bought on the first day or something).

There's a reason nobody has ever cheapened the Stradivarius by creating new technology. The selling point is craftsmanship and good design. The 808's a work of art and it's always better to have the real thing, if you're serious about music. (I mean absolutely no offense, but it sounds like it's just a hobby to you.)

Speaking of iPads, there's a great simulation of a later-model Korg ER-1 drum machine availabe for iPad. It's called iElectribe. I love it, but I used to own an early version of the real thing, and it was just better. Context: I've owned many drum machines, even built a toy one for fun (the Bleep Drum, from Bleep Labs), and I'm learning to play the drums.

Not professionally, but I owned one for about a year in the mid 1990's. It was sold simply because it didn't fit into the workflow easily. No MIDI, refused to sync to anything properly, weighs a flipton, the step keys were iffy and the worst bit is that the analogue side was crap i.e. it used to drift terribly after it got warm. Programming was pretty good though so i'll give it that.

Access Virus is a rip off. I had a KC and it was no better than a Novation KS6 at a fraction of the cost. Fortunately the scene I was in grew out of the Virus eventually. Not sure about a monotron - horrible sounding feepers. Seem to be trendy but not particularly musical.

I very much doubt many Stradivarius' are actually played. They are like art. The value is subjective. Personally I hate the whining things and would rather use them to smoke some cheese with (this is sarcasm) :)

For me, it's a matter of pragmatism. My Triton sounds pretty good (not too digital) and saves lugging a crap ton of kit around. If it doesn't do something, I'll sample something that does do it and I'm sorted.

NB I was a session keyboardist in the goth/industrial scene for a number of years (also known as unemployed student) so I have some professional experience.

A fair number (unsure of the proportion) of Stradivarius instruments actually are played. John Bell famously played his in a DC Metro station[0].

Many more are played by the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, and principle instrumentalists of various symphonies.

Browsing this list[1] it would seem that many more instruments are in the hands of musicians than are in museums.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stradivarius_instrume...

To be fair, a lot of effort has been put into duplicating the Stradivarius sound, and (so far) it has more to do with botany and meteorology than craftsmanship and design. To be even fairer, according to Wikipedia, Strads have not fared so well in double-blind tests, but that doesn't account for changing ears throughout history.

>There's a reason nobody has ever cheapened the Stradivarius by creating new technology. The selling point is craftsmanship and good design.

Nope, their major selling point is their myth, vintage status and patina.

That's why nobody cheapened them with new technology. Those are not attributes you can make better with technology or that relate to music and audio performance directly.

(That's why, say, the guitar Hendrix played in Woodstock would trump any 10 times better in timbre and keeping its tuning guitar in any auction sale).

There were several A/B tests with Stradivarius and most professional violinists couldn't even tell them apart from regular violins. E.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius#Comparisons_in_sou...

>The 808's a work of art and it's always better to have the real thing, if you're serious about music.

No, that's only if you are serious about collecting stuff. Nothing to do with music.

>(I mean absolutely no offense, but it sounds like it's just a hobby to you.)

Professional electronic musicians, absolutely passionate about music, have used 808 sounds in ROMpler and/or analogue emulation audio plugin form for ages.

Collecting pieces of history, even musical history, has nothing to do with being "serious about music" as a musician.

You're missing a couple of points, the first one being interface. What the machine makes you do to get a rhythm out of it is directly related to the result, just like any other physical instrument. The second, price, is only important because software, especially free, was not a choice. Adjusted for inflation, $250 in 1980 was probably $600-$700, if not more. There are plenty of drum machines you can get for under $300 nowadays.

Drum pads. MIDI in. Interface sorted.

We're not in the 80's now and even in the late 80's a workstation was practical (think Korg M1). I mean Oldfield did pretty well with them and an ST.

Well aware of midi gear. My point was that implicitly comparing those or drum machines to a "real kit" is apples and oranges, because of the interface.

I'm comparing the value derived over the interface.

Half of the value is in the interface, with dedicated knobs, the multiple outputs, the way the sequence is not totally perfect, and the workflow that brings about.

I get where you're coming from but I get that with my workstation.

Triton has assignable knobs and pages and pages of virtual knobs which are trivial to change. If you really want you can stick a MIDI knob box in the back of it and associate those to a virtual control including parameters equivalent to the 808's.

Triton has multiple outs and multiple internal busses. Think of it as a 120 note polyphonic synth with 16 part timbrality, built in rack of effects, built in sequencer, built in sampler and a full size studio mixer and half a hard disk recorder (TBH I use an external DAT because they're bomb proof). Plus it burns and rips CDs and loads Akai samples off floppies and CDs. It's a whole pile of awesome which fits in a flight case.

My rhythm is naff enough that the Triton's sequencer has the resolution to pick it up. If I really want to, which as per you I don't, I can quantize on the device and get it perfect. Then I can assign patterns to keys and play them with my left hand while I hammer out a lead with the right hand.

Still to this day my brother and I make do with step sequencers and VST's... I've always wanted a real drum machine or sampler but just have never been able to afford it.

Calculated for inflation, the price today would be $600-$700.

There was a time in the 80s when you could pick up a TB-303 or a TR-808/909 for $20 -- nobody wanted them! The 303 didn't sound like a bassline. The 808 certainly didn't sound like actual drums. And the people buying them weren't classically trained musicians: they were dudes who liked the music and wanted to try it themselves.

There's a documentary I really like on the history of House music called "Pump Up The Volume," and it can actually be found entirely on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HpY65cXDA -- it covers what some of the early genre originators were doing and feeling at the time. Generally they were just experimenting, as well as doing the "track -> venue/club -> evaluate" feedback loop so common in the origin of genres. However, I still think it's cool to hear them discuss their unique contributions to a style that would eventually grow far larger than they ever expected.

There are also some good books on the history of electronic music I can recommend, the best one being "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" http://www.amazon.com/Last-Night-DJ-Saved-Life/dp/0802146104...

TB-303 I saw as low as £50 in the UK, but I never saw a 909 going for under £200 and I was looking in the Ads every week from the mid-late 80s onwards. TR-808 was a machine I wasn't so interested in so I can't remember what they went for.

The Korg Volca Beats is pretty cheap, $150 iirc. The whole Volca series is very inspired by the Roland TR series.

Peter Kirn at CDM recently wrote an overview[0] of an 808 clone kit called Yocto[1], though it seems there aren't any available at the moment.

[0] http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/11/tr-808-diy-379e-lets-b...

[1] http://www.e-licktronic.com/en/27-yocto-complet-kit-tr-808-c...

i spent most of my college days producing electronic music in my living room (my roommate was cool with taking up half of it with wires and big clunky hardware)... but to me the biggest killer app of that time was Rebirth. http://www.propellerheads.se/products/rebirth/ it was cheap (or free depending how poor you were) and replaced $1000's worth of hardware.. really it's the highest value app i can think of that time (at the retail price).. of course the analog sound was emulated but it still sounded pretty badass. i later got a 303 clone (futureretro 777) but still kept using Rebirth. one day when the rat race slows down i'll remove the dust from the 777 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com