Video 21844654968:

All Hail The Beat by Nelson George

A short film overview of the highly beloved Roland TR-808 drum machine. 

“It’s kick drum sound is legendary.”

Audio 20711151454:

ynohtna
Afraid of Sharks (Kane'ae bite)
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Unearthed this old live recording yesterday when rummaging around the dustier corners of my hard drives for other stuff.

Correlating my memories of the recording location (Hove, actually) and the gear used —

  • Roland TR808 & MC202 & Casio CZ-1000 synced and sequenced by a Roland MSQ700*
  • Moog Moogerfooger MF-101 low-pass filter pedal
  • Spirit Folio Rac Pac mixer
  • Overly heavy handed usage of a crappy Behringer compressor
  • Lexicon Vortex and three (!) Zoom 1201 effects units in a mutual feedback configuration

— indicates that this was sometime back in the dark ages of 1998, shortly before I went on an year-long brain-breaking bender of making painfully unpalatable, semi-modular experimental noise nonsense.

1998 isn’t that long ago, is it?

Oh.

* A pretty damn retro setup even in 1998; ridiculously quaint now. Which reminds me that I need to liberate the CZ; it’s been on loan for over a decade and I miss it.

Audio 16457293964:

Aleph Null
Acid Rust [January acid pattern]
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My stab at the January acid pattern recorded live last night.

Rust Creep’s original pattern is a cool smooth 4 bar thing but I got tired after inputting the first 13 notes and then absent-mindedly left the door open for some weird mutants to creep in, confuse me massively with their monkeying around, and introduce stacks of hard-to-control layered distortion.

Eh, it happens.

Audio 16174138314:

Aleph Null
Bow Cell
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I had trouble sleeping last night so I pulled the laptop and headphones into bed and constructed this little experiment.

The gimmick here is that all the sounds are sourced from a single Roland TR-808 cowbell sample. Well, 2 samples if you consider the reversed version separately. Obviously and predictably, massive amounts of processing was involved.

Due to the context, I didn’t employ any outboard synths, mixers, controllers, or effects. Nor, for once, did I employ any third party plug-ins or other special sauce - just (a lot of) what’s natively built into Ableton Live 8.

Thus the project is easy to share (and not very big) so give me a shout if you’d like to have a play with it.

Video 9412196011:

classof808:

Nitro Deluxe - Let’s Get Brutal

One of my all-time favourite tracks, and maybe it’s the overwhelming nostalgia but it still sounds ultra crisp & fresh to my ears.

Video 3837416859:

brandonhixon:

Sneak peak of the new Eventide “Space” Reverb stompbox. Running a Roland TR-808 and TB-303 through some of spatial effects including basic reverbs, delays and unique combination effects.

dat 808 in the background has blue LEDs :o