whatilearned
Read more: https://secretlifeofsynthesizers.com/the-strange-heart-of-the-roland-tr-808/
TIL the unique “sizzling” bass sound of the iconic TR-808, which is now used in almost all pop music, is made by a specific set of rejected transistors. Because they were a mistake, the transistors, and therefore the 808 itself, cannot be reproduced.
6 Comments
Leave a ReplyLeave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The followup article says that they can be replaced
https://secretlifeofsynthesizers.com/roland-tr-808-noise-transistor-update/
From the article “It is not really possible (at least thus far) to build a perfect analogue copy of a Roland TR-808 without these transistors”
Which is a very far cry from saying it can not be reproduced. If you wanted to build a analog machine that organically recreated that sound live, yeah you would have quite the task ahead of you, not the least of your problems being that analog audio snobs are some of the most picky people on the goddamn planet.
It is like saying you can’t “truly” recreate one of the old wax cylinder recording devices, because you can no longer get needles made from the bones of a specific breed of extinct pony or something.
We can, for all intents and purposes, it not being “exact” is really just audio nerd semantics.
Saying it can’t be recreated? It has been digitally, faithfully, several thousand times….
[808](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=808%20documentary&ia=web) is a fantastic little doc that covers the history of this beautiful machine.
>which is now used in almost all pop music
No… I mean just… no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/808_State
But… What does the sizzling sound like? Any audio on it?