Drum Machines

The TR-808 sold badly and was discontinued. The TB-303 was meant to be a bass player for guitarists practising alone, was mocked for not sounding like one, and was dumped into second-hand shops. The TR-909 was another commercial disappointment. Every one of them was rescued from the bargain bin by people who could not afford a band, and misused into a new music, the 303's filter twisted until it screamed, which no manual suggested. This facet is the hardware, and the fact that house was built out of equipment its own makers had written off.

Part of House Music

54 moments in this segment.

  1. - Masters At Work in their New York studio. Unseen VHS footage of Louie Vega and Kenny Dope working in their NYC studio, found on a dusty tape by Mr Bongo, who had commissioned remixes from them at the time. It shows the samplers, the desk and the working method behind the records instead of the finished track. Studio footage of house producers from this period is rare.
  2. - Roland TR-909. The TR-909, released in 1983 as the successor to the 808 and the first Roland drum machine to use samples. Like the 808 and the 303 before it, it sold badly, went out of production and was picked up cheap secondhand by the musicians who then built house and techno on it.
  3. - Roland TB-303, close up. The Roland TB-303 Bass Line, sold from 1981 to 1984 as a computerised bass machine for guitarists with no bass player. It failed at that: the sound was judged unrealistic and Roland discontinued it. That failure is why it turned up cheap secondhand in Chicago, and cheap secondhand is how acid house got made.
  4. - A 303 in the rack. A TB-303 racked with a TR-606, an MPC500 and small effects units. The 303 almost never worked alone; acid records were built by wiring it to whatever else was already on the desk.
  5. - A 1982 TB-303, still working. A TB-303 built in 1982 and photographed by its owner twenty-five years later, still working. Roland made the machine for three years and stopped. The surviving units are now the expensive part of a sound that was built entirely on cheap equipment: it sold for a few hundred dollars new and went for four figures secondhand within three decades.
  6. - François Kevorkian on studio technology, 2008. A Future Music studio interview with François Kevorkian in his New York room, on the equipment and the mixing approach behind decades of remixes. Gear talk from the engineer's side of the Paradise Garage generation.
  7. - 808 and 909, side by side. The TR-808 of 1980 and the TR-909 of 1983 together. Both were commercial disappointments that Roland stopped making within a few years, and both were then bought secondhand and cheap, largely by Black musicians in Chicago, Detroit and New York. The sound of house is Roland's marketing department having been wrong.
  8. - 09-09-09: An Oral History of the Roland TR-909. A short narrated oral history of the TR-909, made to mark twenty-five years of the machine. It gathers the accounts of the people who used it into a compact history of how a rejected drum machine became a genre's rhythm section. Made for 909 Day, 9 September 2009.
  9. - Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer. The TR-808, launched in 1980 at 1,195 dollars and out of production by 1983 after around twelve thousand units. Roland stopped making it because it could no longer buy the faulty transistors that gave the machine its hiss, and by 1983 secondhand units went for under a hundred dollars. It has since been used on more hit records than any other drum machine.
  10. - Drum machines for sale in Harajuku. A TR-909 and a TR-808 on the shelves at Five G, the vintage synthesiser shop in Harajuku, Tokyo, in September 2010. Since Roland stopped making them the secondhand counter has been where these machines actually live.
  11. - A TB-303 behind glass. A TB-303 on show at the Tekniska Museet in 2010. A commercial flop of 1981, dumped cheap and then rebuilt into a genre by people it was never designed for, ends up in a museum as a historical instrument.
  12. - Vince Lawrence's studio tour. Lawrence walks through the racks at his Slang Music Group studio, naming the machines he works on and how they compare with the cheap Roland boxes that made the first Chicago records. A gear tour by someone who was there when the gear was chosen because it was what the pawn shops had.
  13. - Bassline Baseline - a TB-303 documentary. A twenty-minute video essay on the invention, commercial failure and resurrection of the Roland TB-303. It is the fullest account in this batch of the archive's best machine story: a discontinued flop, dumped cheap in Chicago pawn shops, turned by Phuture into an entire genre. Includes the design context and the people who found the machine afterwards.
  14. - Acid Trax jammed live on TB-303, TR-909, TR-707 and TR-606. A full hardware performance of the Phuture record on the actual Roland boxes it was made from, with the 303's filter and resonance worked by hand throughout. The clearest demonstration in this set of how the acid sound is physically produced.
  15. - BBC Radio 1 Stories: The TR-808, TR-909 and TB-303. A full-length BBC Radio 1 documentary on Roland's three genre-defining boxes, with the producers and DJs who built dance music out of them. It treats the 808, 909 and 303 as instruments rather than curiosities, which is the right frame for a house archive. Roland designed all three for other purposes entirely and discontinued all three as commercial disappointments.
  16. - A 303 clone under computer control. The Cyclone Analogic Bass Bot TT-303, a hardware copy of the TB-303 run from a computer, photographed in 2013. Roland's discontinued failure became a circuit other manufacturers have been rebuilding for thirty years.
  17. - Roland engineers on the TR-909. Roland's own engineers describing how the TR-909's sounds were arrived at, the digital samples and MIDI that separated it from the TR-808 it succeeded. Notable because the company states flatly on the record that house and techno were born out of this machine, an admission about a product it discontinued as a commercial disappointment.
  18. - Roland TR-808 famous drum beats. The drum patterns that made the 808 the most recorded drum machine ever built, played back on the original hardware. It shows how a commercial flop became the rhythmic foundation of hip-hop, electro and house once it was cheap enough for the people who wanted it.
  19. - Roland TR-909 demo. A clean hardware demonstration of the Roland TR-909, released in 1983 as the 808's successor and the first Roland drum machine to use samples. Its kick and open hat are the physical basis of house and techno, and it got there because it failed commercially and was dumped cheap into the hands of musicians in Chicago and Detroit.
  20. - Roland TR-808 demo. A demonstration of the Roland TR-808 across its full voice set. Launched in 1980 at $1,195 and killed off in 1983 after roughly 12,000 units, it was discontinued because Roland could no longer source the faulty transistors that gave it its sizzle, and by 1983 used units were going for under $100.
  21. - Bassline Baseline: a Roland TB-303 documentary. A twenty-minute video essay on the invention, commercial failure and resurrection of the TB-303. It is the clearest single account of the pattern the archive keeps running into: a machine Roland could not sell, dumped cheap secondhand, picked up by young musicians in Chicago and made into a genre.
  22. - Julio Bashmore on his production process. The Bristol house producer opens up a session and walks through how his tracks are actually assembled, from drum programming to the swing that makes them move. It is a Studio Science episode, so the value is in watching the machines and the arrangement rather than hearing the finished record.
  23. - Inside Joe Mansfield's drum machine collection. A visit to the collector behind the Beat Box book, filmed among the actual hardware: rare rhythm units, the Roland boxes and the machines nobody kept. Useful to the archive because it shows the instruments as physical objects with prices and scarcity, not as plug-in presets.
  24. - How to use the Roland TR-808. A full operating walkthrough of the original TR-808: step programming, patterns, fills and the accent and tuning controls. A tutorial whose subject is the historic machine itself, which is how the archive can show the sound being made rather than described.
  25. - Roland TR-909 in action: what makes it sound like that. A hardware demonstration of an original Roland TR-909, isolating the kick, the snap of the snare and the metallic sampled hats that became the physical signature of house and techno. Showing the machine being programmed is the only way to make clear that the sound was a set of engineering decisions, not a style choice.
  26. - The Korg M1 piano and organ presets behind house. A demonstration of the two Korg M1 presets, the organ bass and the piano, that are audible on an implausible number of house records from 1989 onward, played against the originals they appear on. It shows how much of a genre's sound can come down to a factory preset on one workstation keyboard, released in 1988 and sitting in nearly every studio.
  27. - The TR-08 at Machines in Music. Roland's Boutique TR-08, a miniature digital reissue of the TR-808, on the company's stand at the Machines in Music show in New York in October 2017. Roland has spent decades selling copies of the machines it once could not give away.
  28. - Roland TR-909 famous patterns. A walk through the TR-909 patterns that became famous records, programmed on the machine itself so you can hear how each one is actually built. It is the most direct way to show that the rhythmic vocabulary of house is a specific box being programmed a specific way.
  29. - Roland TR-909 video manual. A full operating manual on video for the original TR-909: sequencing, accent, shuffle, flam and the sound-shaping controls, at length and on the real hardware. Everything the archive says about the machine's sound is verifiable here.
  30. - Roland TB-303 Bass Line in action. The TB-303 demonstrated as an instrument: the filter cutoff and resonance being swept live, producing the squelch that Chicago producers found by misusing a machine sold as a bass accompaniment for guitarists. Roland made it from 1981 to 1984, sold badly, and discontinued it; the cheap secondhand units that resulted are what made acid house possible.
  31. - Electric Rhythm: the history of the drum machine. A produced history of the drum machine from the 1930s Rhythmicon through the Roland and Linn boxes that rebuilt popular music. It gives the machines facet its long view: the instruments house was made on did not appear from nowhere, and most of them were sold to musicians who did not want them.
  32. - DJ Pierre on the Roland TB-303. Roland's own 303 Day film, in which DJ Pierre talks through the silver box he and Phuture turned into acid house. The company that built the machine as a bass-guitar substitute, sold it from 1981 to 1984 and gave up on it hands the story to the Chicago musician who found the sound it is actually famous for.
  33. - How the TB-303 Changed Music: Hood, Hawtin and Ware. Robert Hood, Richie Hawtin, Martyn Ware and Cosey Fanni Tutti recall first encountering the TB-303 and what it did to their records. First-hand testimony from people who were making music when the machine surfaced, rather than a retrospective narration. Short, but it is primary-source interview material.
  34. - Land of the Rising Sound: a Roland retrospective. A feature-length independent documentary on Roland told through its instruments, with the TR-808, TR-909 and TB-303 in their proper place as commercial disappointments that outlived their intended market. Seventy-two minutes on the hardware that made house physically possible.
  35. - A TR-808 in the Musical Instrument Museum. A TR-808 in the collection of the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, photographed in August 2019. It took under forty years for a discontinued consumer product to be catalogued as a musical instrument.
  36. - Todd Terry breaks down I'll House You in the studio. A track deconstruction of Royal House's 'Can You Party' and 'I'll House You' with Todd Terry explaining the sampler and drum-machine method that built them. It shows the actual technique behind the records that welded hip-hop to house.
  37. - Behringer TD-3. The Behringer TD-3, a cheap modern copy of the TB-303 released long after the original went out of production. The original is now a collector's instrument; the clone is what most people who want that sound actually play.
  38. - François K and Carl Craig on studio technique. An excerpt from a four-hour livestream in which Kevorkian and Carl Craig compare studio methods, outboard gear and what modern production changed. New York and Detroit talking shop about how the records are physically made.
  39. - E-mu SP-1200, the twelve-bit drum sampler. A working look at the E-mu SP-1200, released in 1987, whose twelve-bit converters and short sampling time forced a gritty, compressed sound that producers then chose deliberately. It sits in the archive as the other half of the sampling story alongside the MPC: the machine whose limitations became a texture, and whose crunch turns up across late-eighties club records.
  40. - Rebuilding Phuture's Acid Tracks patterns on a TB-303. A step-by-step reconstruction of the 303 sequences behind Acid Tracks, Phuture Jacks and Your Only Friend, played on the machine itself. It shows exactly which accent and slide settings produce the squelch that named a whole genre.
  41. - The Roland CR-78, the first famous drum machine. A short hardware history of Roland's 1978 CompuRhythm CR-78, the preset box that made the company's name in rhythm machines two years before the TR-808. It sets up the lineage the archive cares about: Roland was already the drum machine company by the time it built the boxes house was made on.
  42. - A Brief History of the Roland TB-303 Bassline. A documentary short on the TB-303, the monophonic bass synth Roland made from 1981 to 1984 and gave up on. It covers the design under Tadao Kikumoto, the commercial failure, and the second life the machine found in Chicago. The squelch it produces is the single most recognisable sound in acid house.
  43. - Roland TB-303 acid house demo. The Roland TB-303 producing the sound it is famous for: the resonant, sliding squelch that Phuture turned into acid house. Roland built it as a bass accompaniment for guitarists, sold it from 1981 to 1984, discontinued it as a failure, and it was rescued secondhand and used entirely wrong.
  44. - Inception - the birth of the Roland TR-808. A mini-documentary on how the TR-808 came to be built, tracing the design decisions and the analogue circuitry that produced its booming kick. Roland launched it in 1980 at around $1,195, sold roughly twelve thousand and killed it by 1983, after which it became the cheap machine that Black American producers in Chicago, New York and Detroit rebuilt popular music with.
  45. - TB-303 and TR-909 Acid Jam. A live hardware jam with a TB-303, TR-909 and TR-606 running together, showing exactly how an acid line is built and filtered in real time. No sequencer screen, no DAW: just the machines and the hands on them. Useful as a demonstration of the physical process the records were made by.
  46. - Two 303s on a porch in Somerville. A pair of Roland TB-303 Bass Line units driving a set for a street crowd at Somerville Porchfest in 2023. Roland made the 303 from 1981 to 1984 and dropped it as a failure; it has outlived that verdict by four decades.
  47. - Egyptian Lover programming the TR-808. Egyptian Lover, one of the few people who never stopped using the machine, working an original TR-808 and explaining how he builds a pattern on it. Filmed for 808 Day, it is a demonstration rather than a retrospective: the drums that West Coast electro and Chicago house were both built from, being made in front of the camera.
  48. - A short history of the TR-909 in sixteen songs. A pattern-by-pattern breakdown of the Roland TR-909, the 1983 machine that gave house and techno their kick and open hat, programmed live against the records that used it. Kept as a gear demonstration rather than a countdown: it shows what was actually played into the box.
  49. - The Story of the TR-909. A short documentary on how Roland's TR-909 was designed, sold badly, and then became the backbone of house and techno. It traces the machine from its 1983 release through its discontinuation and resurrection on secondhand racks. The gear layer matters because the sound of house is inseparable from the boxes that made it.
  50. - A Short History of the TB-303 in Twelve Records. A history of the Roland TB-303 told through the records that defined its use, with the actual patterns played back on the machine. Roland built it as a bass accompaniment for guitarists and discontinued it as a failure in 1984; Chicago producers found it secondhand and made acid out of it. The playback of real patterns is what earns this a place over a talking-head explainer.
  51. - Roger Linn and the sampled drum machine. The story of the Los Angeles guitarist whose LM-1 and LinnDrum put real recorded drums inside a programmable box, the other half of the drum machine story that runs alongside Roland's synthetic boxes. Linn took part in the film himself, which makes it first-hand rather than a compilation.
  52. - A playable 808 at SMEM. A TR-808 on display in the Playroom of the Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments in January 2026. Keeping the machines out where people can reach them is a different argument about what they are than a vitrine makes.
  53. - Akai MPC60, the sampler that changed the workflow. The most thorough of the MPC histories the scout returned: origins, Roger Linn's design, the sampling workflow and the swing that gave the machine its feel. The MPC60 arrived in 1988 and put sampling and sequencing in one box, which is how the sample-built side of house, the disco loop, the stolen string stab, became something one person could do alone in a bedroom.
  54. - Roland Juno-106 - the analogue pad sound. A no-talking demonstration of an original Roland Juno-106, running through the warm pads, strings and basses that ran under a great deal of late-eighties house. The Juno family is the counterweight to the drum machines in this archive: Larry Heard built "Can You Feel It" on a Juno bassline over a TR-909, and that pairing is most of the deep house template.
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