Gadgetory

hello my name is Trent Wolvie I have been a drum machine addict for 16 years and I have zero days sober and I am kind of freaking out right now and this is the verge in 1980 the Japanese electronics company Rowland released the tr-808 rhythm composer for a long time people thought the only way to make dance music was with this machine the noises that came from the analog circuitry inside made people go insane on the dance floor but Roland stopped making the 808 after just a few years in the mid 80s you can buy one on eBay now for around three grand or used one of thousands of hardware or software indicators they all work pretty good but they've been you know just copycats paper rings wax figurines tumble ODEs to a classic until now this is the tr-8 the first true spiritual successor to the tr-808 but it's all digital and it has something to say to all the haters Roland developed a totally new modeling language called analog circuit behavior to faithfully recreate the big sounds of transistors and diodes that made the tr-808 so famous I am sitting here listening to it with my own ears and I can tell you this is not some marketing BS this is indistinguishable from that 1980 kick actually wait a second I can tell the difference this kick sounds better than the original yeah I said it and this one only costs 500 bucks eat it eBay thirty four years later the company responsible for creating a generation of analog drum machine fetishists is killing off any reason to still be a fetishist it's like when they remastered Seinfeld in HD no one scoffed fidelity and bought a bunch of old VHS is in protest to be real with you though the kick drum wasn't the reason I became a drum machine addict the funnest and most awesome part of using an old 808 is how simple it is to create beats with a 16-7 first the TR 8 doesn't just sound like a champ we've got this visceral tactile experience with all the straightforwardness and get done mentality of ass ancestor so with a big old truckload of intuitive new control features and they give really fun to make music on we took a short break to sit down and friend and Ryan from rolling to talk about workflow it's amazing to see people actually say wow there's no LED screen how great that is you know there was a time when of course everybody wanted a screen on everything you know computers are great for you know that's the primary place people are making music is is in computers but there is a certain level of non immediacy I guess the lack of immediacy when you're going using these everything you kind of have to think about um if you want to add a step or or glitch something a lot of times it's a process you have to go through in that amount of time an idea can become lost or it could become just not worth the effort or you might not try it or experiment having you know one-to-one knobs and knob that always does one thing you're just reaching up and being able to play things fit just different stuff comes out and I think almost anybody no matter how into computers and plugins you are you put them in front of something like this and they'll do things that they wouldn't do in a virtual representation so let's go in and hear that classic tr-808 sound coming out of the TR a kick drum right here snare drum right there bringing the Tom's rimshot Handclap clothes hat open hat crash cymbal and the ride that's all I had to do to make a kind of sick beat if I do say so myself but that's not all lowland is updating to the 21st century meet the new era family this is the TV 3 the VT 3 and a system one spiritual successors to the TV 303 baseline machine the VP 330 vocoder and the sh-101 synthesizer they may not have been as famous as their 808 Big Brother but they are every bit as important in shaping the sound of electronic music listen up yalll since all this crazy software started coming out and when I say crazy software I really mean Ableton Live it's been kind of hard for me I mean how am I supposed to crank out epic dance jams on the same machine I used to watch porn and like do gchat and spreadsheets on I just loved boxes you know what I mean they're my little buddies they don't make me feel like I'm at a goddamn office trying to be productive I mean you can't do your taxes on a Stratocaster and you shouldn't get with them on a damn drum machine neither as sick as that analog circuit behavior modeling maybe or as heavy as the kick on the tr-8 sounds rolling nose it really only needs to manufacture one thing to turn on an entire new generation of habits