[Dynagroove] bluffers guide: 808,909,303

[Tony Watson]

bluffers guide: 808,909,303 

This piece originally featured in Jockey Slut magazine
as a lay man's primer to the old Japanese technology
that almost all house and techno was founded on. Next
stop Tomorrow's World for me....
 

Techno has turned ordinary record buyers into badly
informed technology-obsessives.

Sorry to put a spanner in your kraftwerks but Techno,
in case you hadn’t noticed, has  got fuck all to do
with technology. The original sounds of Detroit (
which spotters are still trying to carbon copy ten
years down the line) were made with cheap boxes with
less complex wiring in them than the average pocket
calculator. Derrick, and his Gary Numan obsessed mates
couldn’t afford anything else at the time. Yet over
zealous fan boys insist on making simple music
signifying a vague futurist agenda. into an ideology.
Little wonder then that the now antiquated and
outmoded equipment used by the early pioneers of
techno (and house too) has become over-valued,
over-priced and overworked in back bedrooms and
studios across the land. Can’t keep up with the
counter bores at your local specialist record store?
Find yourself wondering just what knobs the Chemical
Brothers are twisting so furiously during those
apocalyptic drum rolls? Feel like a girl when the lads
are talking techno-twaddle? Then read on for an
instant guide to the machines they all want for
Christmas.

If you need a reason why you can’t have a decent
conversation with any DJ who has been inside a
twenty-mile radius of a recording studio, then you
need to speak to Roland. Not Ro-land with the glasses
on from Grange Hill, but a Japanese electronic musical
instrument manufacturer who, opening for business in
1972, couldn’t have foreseen the influence its
percussive gadgets would have on a whole genre of
music. Roland’s first products were square-bear
synthesisers and pianos. Sales of their cheap and
cheerful Dr Rhythm Drum Machine in 1979 convinced them
however, that there was a demand for unrealistic
bongs, clicks and clonks. 

Before the DR55, drum machines had looked like your
mum's  dressing tables with flashing lights and
sounded like the entire contents of a knife draw been
thrown down the stairs. And you couldn’t program them
either. Roland technology had invented the future. Oh
dear. Next stop, Depeche Mode.

If the DR 55 was a rhythmic Lada, the TR 808 was
recognised as a percussive Rolls Royce of its day. By
the time it had really started to make its mark around
1987, it was almost a decade old and the cabaret
pianists who had originally bought it had also
forgotten about it. It’s sad to say that despite its
quaint charms, the 808’s familiarity has bred
contempt. Although it can be heard used in an almost
inspirational manner on Rhythim Is Rhythim’s ‘It Is
What It Is’ and it’s distinctive bass drum boom is
still sworn by, it never really had the punch to power
house like the TR 909. Still, Marvin Gaye’s Sexual
Healing is built around it and many mid-eighties soul
records would be largely empty had it not been made
available. Add to this the fact that, even now, you
can’t make an Electro record without sampling the
endearingly crap cowbell sound, and it’s clear that
the TR 808 will go down in rhythmic history.

The cream coloured horror box referred to as the TR
909 might have gone down in history too had a load of
UK deadheads with ideas buzzing around their empty
heads like lonely wasps not got their hands on this
now creatively unsalvageable machine. It got off to a
good start in the hands of, Farley, Armando, Mike Dunn
and Steve Poindexter as the essential jacking box. The
909 was house music and we loved it dearly until some
English burk found out you could multiply the snare
drum sound until it became a kind of sonic blur, ever
increasing in volume. Hey Presto! A house DJ with the
musical intelligence of a Toto fan had invented the
infamous drum roll- Saturday night nightmare of every
discerning dancer. Now its sad subtlety- free thump
plots the course of a million double-pack remixes and,
as a result of its popularity with the under-educated,
should you want to buy one, you won't get much change
from a grand. Cheaper say, to sample yourself running
a stick along the school railings and far more
original. If you still have a 909 and are feeling a
bit of a herb by now, why not, like Derrick May and
Aphex Twin, pretend to your mates that you have taken
the top off yours and fiddled around with it to make
it sound better then everyone else’s.

The Roland TR 303, smallest and most influential box
of them all, began life as an impenetrable automated
bass player. Only people with heads as big as Brian
Eno's could figure out how to work the 303. A
commercial flop for Roland until... 

The great Marshall Jefferson once told me that nobody
in Chicago could get anything out of this silver
machine so someone came up with the solution of taking
the batteries out, putting them back in, switching the
303 on and seeing what happened. That could explain a
lot of the nonsensical, impossible genius of early
acid. The batteries story is probably bollocks but,
then again, pre- 1987, you'd have died of shock had
you heard someone strolling down the street whistling
Acid Tracks. As a result of records like this, the 303
became known as the acid machine. Acid, put simply, is
the sound made by a constantly repeating pattern 
modulated with the little knobs on the top of the
machine so it becomes bassier, then more extreme or
squelchy and distorted. Most of the great acid records
consist of a drum pattern and someone twisting these
knobs round for an hour or two. Boring now, I know,
but it sounded like all hell was being let loose back
then. The fact that the 303 died a creative death
several years back did not however stop Josh Wink from
making a career out of shaking his fake dreads around,
hunched over a 303 while treating us to the house
equivalent of a sad metal guitar solo. Add to this the
fact that lads with no shirts on, in the time-honoured
fashion of air guitarists at rawk shows across middle
America, now twist their thumbs and fingers around in
mid-air during the acid sections of progressive house
records, and it’s clear much damage has been done. 

Yet, the simple aims of the faceless men from Osaka-
to provide the drummer-less with drums; the bass-less
with bass, have inadvertently provided us with a lot
of great music. Even so, the great house/techno
dustbin is so full of mindless nonsense, I suggest
that, rather than joining in when the lads start
talking Roland numbers, you should declare the
conversation bollocks and start talking about Moogs
and Theremins like the proper little clever dick I
know you are.

John McCready. 

www.mekanic.com


	
		
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