If you have turned on the radio in the last decade, you may have noticed a growing trend in the sound of pop and rap music. That is the use of synthetic sounding drums, booming bass, metallic snares, and rattling hi-hats. These drums have very little “swing” as natural drummers do, but instead, they are impossibly precise, leaving room for other elements of a song to build off its steady tempo. What you are hearing is the legacy of the Roland TR-808, a piece of musical hardware that revolutionized popular music and continues to define the sound of mainstream music in the 21st century. However, this ubiquitous drum sound hasn’t been around forever. When looking back at more classic rap tracks (Hip Hop being the genre that this sound has most found its home in), one can see that these digital drums were not always the norm. Instead, they were for a long time were confined to the emerging EDM scene with genres like Chicago House and Electro. Some of Hip-Hops most revered acts, from the Wu-Tang Clan to NWA to Nas, hardly ever touched the 808 during their most influential years.
However that all changed as 808’s became more and more popular. This little machine from Japan, the brainchild of the legendary innovator Ikutaro Kakehashi, had soon taken over the sounds of Hip Hop, Pop, RnB, and New Wave. By the time the 808 saw mainstream success everyone from Talking Heads to Marvin Gaye to Kraftwerk were using it, and it only grew in significance. However, if you listen to some of the first applications of the Roland Tr-808 in popular music, such as the seminal “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambataa and the Soulsonic Force, it can’t help but feel extremely dated. All of the elements of the drums, most notably the computerized horn shots and cowbells, definitely do not fit in with the current musician paradigm. However, that comes with one, HUGE exception: the bass. The Tr-808 is not the first drum machine by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the Tr-808 was initially a commercial failure because of its strange, synthetic drum sounds. But the one greatest thing it did was create what we now call “808’s”. Turn on literally any trap song either with a pair of headphones or in the car and you will feel the legacy of this machine. See, the 808 came pre-loaded with a kick drum that revolutionized the way modern artists look at the low end of a song. No longer was the norm to hire a bassist to give a song a sense of groove and rhythm. Instead, budding producers could simply add these huge, almost subsonic kick drums to their songs, tuned to the right key, and working in tandem with the central melody. This 808 sound has been a truly defining feature of western music for the last five decades.
That is not to say that the 808 has remained unchanged. Hardly any modern producers will use an analog tool like the original Tr-808. Instead what is commonly used is the next step in what the 808 began: crunchier snares, more synthetic hi-hats (arranged in new rhythms that the original machine could never produce), and a much more prominent bass sound. So while music has shifted to being recorded more in a digital fashion, with programs on computers called “Digital Audio Workstations,” these programs actually are often modeled after the TR-808 not only in sound but in appearance as well. For instance, FL Studio’s, one of the most commonly used professional music-making programs, uses a channel rack meant to mimic the keys and style of a TR-808. In this way, the 808 continues to shape the sound and process of making music long after the death of mainstream analog recording. It is the reason that this little Japanese drum machine, a piece of equipment that failed to make any money at all, went on to define the Kanye’s, Metro Boomin’s, Madlib’s, and Rick Rubin’s of the world. It is the reason that while you may have never seen the Roland Tr-808, you have heard it.