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“You try to get a drummer to play something simple for 10, 15 minutes, he won’t do it,” Phil Collins says in 808. This technique was taken to new levels by the rap group Original Concept, and then by Miami Bass producers.īut just as the machine could produce a myriad number of strange sounds, it could also just play the same thing over and over.
#Tr 808 drum kit full#
But by tuning the drum sound to full decay, Rick Rubin discovered that the 808 could be used to create bass lines. Initially, producers focused on the 808 as a source of percussion. Just when you think you’ll never hear a record using that cowbell, a record will come out and blow your mind.” For a while you couldn’t use the cowbell. “One year my favorite sound was the rimshot,” Baker says. The 808 could make a variety of sounds, and each of these could be adjusted in various ways. The first thing you would hear - you wouldn’t hear the low end, you would hear the hi-hat. “But I would be on the beach the summer we put out a mile away you would hear the hi-hat.
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“The low end of the 808 is so low,” Baker adds. “The relationship between the bass and the snare became something entirely different.” “It created a different space sonically in music,” Damon Albarn asserts in 808. When producers started using drum machines, the importance of rhythm was further intensified. … Then, from the time of Sly and the Family Stone’s Fresh album, there’s a flip over, where the rhythm instruments, particularly the bass drum and bass, suddenly become the important instruments in the mix.” “If you listen to records from the Fifties,” he explained, “you’ll find that all the melodic information is mixed very loud – your first impression of the piece is of melody – and the rhythmic information is mixed rather quietly. It altered pop’s sense of sonic space.Īt a lecture in 1979, Brian Eno discussed a transition point in the composition of pop music. I just knew that it was something different we had done. “You didn’t know it was there, and then it would just blow up a speaker.” By channeling this potent sound into “Planet Rock,” he immediately felt he had helped create something remarkable: “I went home and I told my wife at the time, ‘We made musical history,'” he tells Rolling Stone. One of the first hits to incorporate an 808 was “Planet Rock.” “ has this low end that couldn’t really hear,” Baker says in the film.
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It injected a new level of power into pop music. “A lot of producers would hear the 808 and say, ‘That doesn’t sound like a drum, why would we do that?’ But the people who made the records with the 808 thought, ‘It doesn’t sound like a real drum - that’s cool.'”ģ. “It took outside-thinking producers to want to use it,” Baker says. It attracted producers willing to break pop’s rules. “I really didn’t know anything at all,” he says, but thanks to the 808, he didn’t need to.Ģ. “The hip-hop records I was hearing at the time didn’t really reflect what was going on at the club.” So he decided to make his own. “I was a fan of hip-hop,” Rubin notes in the movie. A young Rick Rubin produced one his first records, T La Rock and Jazzy J’s “It’s Yours,” using an 808. You didn’t have to have any special musical training to program an 808 – you just had to be willing to take a risk and program the hardest, strangest beat around.
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It allowed anyone a chance to become a producer. It includes interviews with a multi-genre collection of heavy hitters, from the Beastie Boys to Jam and Lewis to Phil Collins Arthur Baker, who produced Afrika Bambaataa’s iconic 1982 single “Planet Rock” and helped craft records for Hall and Oates and New Order, served as the film’s co-executive producer.įrom watching 808 and speaking with Baker, here are eight things we learned about the ways the the drum machine changed music.ġ. The film is a testament to one machine’s wide-ranging appeal.