Switched on Pop - 808: The drum machine that changed music forever (Twenty Thousand Hertz)

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

The 808 is arguably the most iconic drum machine ever made. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve definitely heard it. It’s in dozens of hit songs -- from Usher to Marvin Gaye, Talking Heads to The Beastie Boys -- and its sounds have quietly cemented themselves in the cultural lexicon. In this episode, we try to understand how that happened and follow the unlikely path of the 808. Featuring DJ Jazzy Jeff and Paul McCabe from Roland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

We live in a moment of great anxiety about the future of technology and human creativity. And maybe that's because the two are so intertwined. I mean, just think of how creatively limited we would be without the development of charcoal, the printing press, the piano. And pop music history is really a series of technological breakthroughs, the gramophone, four-track tape, digital reverb, and my personal favorite, I think the sound of pop music over the last 40 years is owed to a single drum machine. Of course, I'm talking about the TR 808. It's the sound of sexual healing. Planet Rock.

I want to dance with somebody. And even Drake's latest song, Nokia. The story of the 808 has a lot to tell us about the intersection of human creativity and technology. It was intended just to make demo recordings. It failed in its initial manufacturing run and was repurposed by the internet. groundbreaking musicians, making it the predominant backing sound to countless pop, hip hop, and yes, even country hits. So today I want to share the story of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, as told by the podcast 20,000 Hertz, hosted by Dallas Taylor. It's my favorite narrative podcast

that tells the story of the sounds in our life. Here's Dallas and 20,000 Hertz with the story of the 808. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor. Whenever I listen to vintage music, one of the first things that I notice is a lack of bass. For example, in 1912, the top song in America was The Haunting Melody by Al Jolson. Since this was recorded with a full orchestra, there's almost certainly a double bass in there, but you'd never know it from the record. 20 years later, things were not much better. Here's a Louis Armstrong track from the early 30s.

In this one, the double bass is just barely audible. In the 1950s, the bass started becoming a bit more noticeable. In Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, you can definitely hear what the bassist is playing, though it's still pretty quiet. A decade later, bass guitars were much more common, but the recordings were still pretty thin. In this Rolling Stones track, the bass guitar and kick drum just aren't very present. Now, it's not that people back then didn't care about bass. The microphones they had just weren't very good at capturing those frequencies. And even if they could, the speakers and headphones that people had just couldn't reproduce those

low-pitched sounds. But in the 60s and 70s, a few different companies released microphones that were much more sensitive to low frequencies. At the same time, people started investing in stereo systems that could blow those old 50s radios out of the water. The result was an explosion of bass-heavy music, from rock classics like day. and confused, to disco hits like La Freak. But as bassy as that is, it's nowhere near the booming, sub-rattling tones we hear today.

To unlock a sound like that, musicians would need something truly revolutionary. It was a little device that came out in the early 80s and went on to transform the sound of popular music. The 808 drum machine. The 808 is everywhere. You may or may not know it by name, but you've definitely heard it before. I laugh because if I listen to the radio for an hour, there's not one record that you hear that's not an 808. That's DJ Jazzy Jeff. He's a world-renowned DJ, producer, and hip-hop icon.

Famously, he was Will Smith's partner back in his fresh prince days. Commanding the cut, he's always on track. He's DJ Jazzy Jeff and he's a guitar. Cut me and ask for your personal safety, you should be told that my DJ Jazzy Jeff is Jazzy Jeff. We were seeking out what we heard on the early hip-hop records and the machines that they used,

and there was nothing that was more distinctive and more sought after than the 808. The Roland TR 808 is a drum machine. That's Paul McCabe from Roland, the company that created the 808. When they first released it back in the early 80s, drum machines weren't exactly. sought after. For 20 or 30 years, they had mostly been used in the home.

We have to remember in the 70s, the 60s, the 50s, music being played in the home was still a very popular thing, and television hadn't taken over the living room quite yet. So families would often gather around and they would play music. People would play music as a pastime. A high percentage of the population was playing music. And though families were hanging out in the living room playing music, they typically didn't have a drum kit laying around. They might have a guitar, maybe a piano, or an organ. As you can imagine, people wanted a rhythmic instrument that wasn't as big or loud as a live drum kit. If you see photos of some of the earliest drum machines, in fact, you'll even see drum machines

that are designed to sit on top of an organ where the music rest would normally be. So particularly the earliest drum machines, we're really working to try and recreate the sound of a small acoustic drum kit, and so there would be a kick drum and a snare drum and cymbals and tom-toms. For years, drum machines were used casually, and professional musicians mostly ignored them. But in time, musicians did start to find uses for drum machines. By the early 70s, many songwriters would program a drumbeat and then write to it. Now, most of the time, this drum machine would get replaced by a live drummer, but not always, one of the first recordings to include a the drum machine was Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone.

Around the same time, early versions of electronic music were starting to go mainstream. This is the robots by Craftwork. Craftwork is a four-piece band out of Dusseldorf, Germany. They would be one of the founding fathers of techno. For craftwork, drum machines were a perfect complement to their precise synthesized bass lines. By the late 70s, drum machines were finally gaining traction. They started to become used more in live performance in a situation where either an acoustic drummer wasn't available or to enhance a rhythm section, and then they started to appear in recordings. At the time, one of the most popular drum machines was the Roland CR78, which was a predecessor to the 808.

Here it is in Blondie's Heart of Glass. And here's the CR 78 and Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight. These songs inspired early demand for a stage-ready drum machine, so Roland got to work on a new model. They wanted to build a machine that was portable, flexible, and durable. 1-1c's a TR808. It almost looks military. In its design, it's kind of a drab all of color. And there's a reason why TR8-08 are still being used today because you could drive a truck over them, and probably many of them would still work. That was kind of what was in our mind. at the time. Where it went to, needless to say, is someplace quite different.

Over the centuries, there have been a few instruments that changed music forever. The piano revolutionized classical music. Electric guitars defined rock and roll. And the 808 transformed hip-hop and electronic music. When we think about the sound of the 808, we think of it in terms of its influence on hip-hop and R&B. And, you know, when we think of hip-hop, of course, we start with Africa-Babata and Planet Rock. It's this otherworldly mashup of this kind of East Coast New York sound with craftwork.

Like a lot of musicians at the time, DJ Jazzy Jeff heard Planet Rock and was captivated by the drum sounds. We emulated whatever we heard. So, you know, when Planet Rock came out, it was kind of like, I need that machine. There was no drum machine that had a kick drum that sounded like that,

that had a snare that sounded like that, that had a Christmas to the high hats like an 808. So it was definitely sought after so that you could kind of make these records. Once these DJs got their hands on the 808, they started expanding on its possibilities. Listen, listen, listen for the beat box. There was a record funkbox party by Mastodon committee, and he was a DJ that was very, very good on an 808. Musicians were experimenting.

Here's Egyptian lover over on the West Coast. And here's some 808 electrofunk from a group called the SOS band. Here's Indian musician Chiarin Zit Singh using an 808 on his album 10 Raghaz to a disco beat. And here's Marvin Gay's more minimalist use of the 808. As the 808 took off, it wasn't clear if this sound had any staying power. It could just be a flash in the pan that would be replaced by the next big thing. There was all these moments that were happening, these musical moments that were very serendipitous in the early 80s, that, you know, if they'd go on left instead of right, if this guy did this on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday, we probably wouldn't be talking about the 808 in this context today. It was literally that kind of magical.

A huge factor in that magic had to do with the 808's bass drum sound and a little knob for controlling it labeled decay. That one tiny knob allowed musicians to push the bass in their music farther than they ever had before, and it created a sound that still dominates to this day. That's coming up, after the break. When drum machines were first developed, they were meant to replace live drummers, so the goal was to sound like a real drum kit using artificial sounds. The Roland 808 was designed with the same idea in mind. Even when we got to the TR808, the technology was designed to really,

recreate an acoustic drum kit. The 808 was released in 1980, and at first, it wasn't a big hit. For one thing, it cost $1,200, which is about $4,600 in today's money. And soon after it came out, the 808 got some tough competition. Right about that same time, 1981, the first drum machine that used recorded sound clips or samples came into being. This new generation of drum machines could play real. recorded drum sounds. Once they hit the scene, they made synthesized drum machines like the 808 sound

dated. To me, this is very Nintendo and Atari-ish. Here's my computer version of what I think a drum kit is supposed to sound. And it doesn't sound anything like a drummer or a drum set at all. At the time, an Atari video gamey drum sound just wasn't what people wanted on their records. But after a couple years of mediocre sales, the 808 started showing up in pawn shops for a fraction of the price. I ended up getting mine from a pawn shop because you couldn't really walk into a store and see an 808. Musicians started picking them up because it was a piece of equipment they could actually afford. Recording studios often had one on a shelf collecting dust or somebody's friend might lend them one for a live show. But the jury was still out on whether the 808 was anything more

than a cheap machine that couldn't play real drum sounds. The 808 was really facing quite an uphill battle to gain any kind of acceptance. But in a kind of one of these classic, your strength is your weakness paradoxes is where the strength of the drum machines that were based on recordings of actual drum sounds was that at first glance they sounded more natural. On the other hand, certainly with the technology available at that time, you couldn't really adjust the sound that much. We were used to having a drum machine that you were stuck with basically the sound,

that came out of it. There wasn't too much manipulation that you can do. So to have this machine that you can take the snappiness out of the snare and you can add more boom into the kick. This one machine could sound a hundred different ways.

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the 80A may have sounded artificial but those video gamey tones were highly adjustable and that

ended up being the key to its success and so with that in mind you look and you've got

these 11 sounds here's the kick snare closed high hat open high hat

crash symbol tom's hand clap, rim shot, cowbell. You always got to have more cowbell. And finally, clave. When you start getting into the clav and the cowbell, those were two very distinctive sounds that if you put them on anything, you knew they came from an 808.

But there was one sound on the 808 that changed music forever, the bass drum, also known as the kick. There was a point in time that I felt like people were afraid of kick drums. You couldn't have the kick drum too loud. You couldn't have it too boomy. Here's Scorpio by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. You can hear that the kick drum is relatively low in the mix. Someone had the heart to put an 808 kick drum that it was round and it was boomy and it felt really good.

Here's Planet Patrol with a rounder, louder kick drum. then somebody on a record opened up the decay and when that kick drum rang out it was nothing like you've ever heard here's DJ Jazzy Jeff himself opening up that decay and letting the kick drum drive the song Have you ever in your life experience the day where nothing at all seems to go your way

No matter how hard you try to get out of the rut You just could not break the string of bad luck a day where Murphy ball takes a song soon enough the sound of the 808 bass drum became synonymous with hip-hop. The idea of young people driving down the street with big, boomy subwifers was largely because of that tone. Here's LaTrem, a Miami-Base hip-hop duo singing about Boomy Car Stereos in 1988, notice the signature sustained 808 bass drum sound. 20 years later, Felix de Housecat released the song Kick Drum, which pushes that decay to its absolute limit. Today, artists often shift the pitch of these 808 kick sounds.

to create full-on bass lines. Over the last couple decades, this technique has been used in hit song after hit song. It's in Hotline Bling by Drake. It's in DNA by Kendrick Lamar. It's in Up by Cardi B. By now, we've heard these booming bass tones in hundreds, if not thousands of tracks.

But back in the early 80s, a sound like that was unheard of. You're not supposed to have your bass drum driving that much. And it's kind of like, why not? Everybody's riding around in their car playing this music and it's vibrating their car and they enjoy that. There's no right and wrong in it. I really feel like the 808 kick drum was one of the first things that started shattering the rules of what you should or shouldn't do when it came to recording music.

The decay control basically turned the 808's bass drum into a whole new instrument. It was so different that the studios making early hip-hop. records didn't even know what to do with it. When we did, he's the DJ, I'm the rapper, was the first record that I used 808 and 808 samples on that I wanted to kick drum to really resonate. And I remember fighting with the engineer because I wanted to push the envelope on how loud

and how deep I wanted the 808 because I knew there were some hip hop records that you would get in a car and you would play, and the entire car would vibrate. And I was like, I want that. But since that was so unusual at the time, the engineer refused. I had to fight with the engineer to turn it up, and he would turn it down and turn it up.

And I had to kind of explain to him, like I understand that there is a technical way that you think you're supposed to do something. I want to push that envelope. I need this to be this loud. I needed to be almost at the brink that it's not distorting and it's not overpowering everything, but I need this to be the focal point of the record. Hip-hop is something that the drums have to drive the record.

And I got him to allow me to do it to the point that I loved it. And what I never realized was I never told the mastering engineer that I wanted that. And he thought it was a mistake. And he took all of the 808 out of the album. And I don't think I've ever said this in public. I can't listen to He's the DJ. I'm the rapper now. That is the biggest record we've ever done,

and I absolutely hate the way that it sounds because they sucked all of the bottom end from the 808 out in Master. Here's a clip from He's the DJ, I'm the rapper, as it is on the record. My rhymes have been written, not to be bitten, but as it seems, some suckers keep forgetting the rules about rapping, but that's all right,

because in the next five minutes, I'm all up. And here's what DJ Jazzy Jeff was probably going for. My rhymes have been written, not to be bitten, but as it seems, some suckers keep forgetting the rules about rapping, but that's all right, because in the next five minutes I'm a- The 808 arrived at exactly the right time. Through the 1970s, the rise of funk and disco made people hungry for thumping bass-heavy music. Then, in the early 80s, the 808 showed up just as hip-hop was starting to take off. It was the perfect storm. When the 808 was absorbed into hip-hop culture, the ability to create that boom and the boom was largely driven by where you tuned the kick and then where you adjusted its decay to, that became the signature. So as hip-hop grew, the sound of hip-hop grew, the backbone of that sound was the 808. Pretty soon, these boomy bass drums spread into R&B, electronic music, and beyond.

Today, the 808 is just air-o-8. everywhere through pop music. And just by saying pop, that's such a wide term now. It encompasses world music, electronic music, and EDM, and techno and house. And it's not an understatement to say that the 808 is an instrument that is actually defined culture. Just like the electric guitar with rock and roll,

the 808 allowed musicians to express new ideas, or at least to express timeless ideas in ways that felt new and exciting. This is why I love music so much, because there's a thousand different combinations and ways to get to a result. At the end of the day, you realize that someone who had a crappy week at work, depending on how you present this music,

you can change their day. You can introduce two people together that end up spending the rest of their lives together just by playing music in a certain way to bring people together. I've been blessed to have a thumbprint in music, and making it or playing it that affects people's moods.

That's the coolest job in the world. I hope you enjoyed that episode of 20,000 Hertz. They have so many more just like it. Please go follow their feed wherever you get your podcast or grab a link in our show notes. We'll see you on Tuesday. 20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of de facto sound.

Find out more at de facto sound.com. This episode was written and produced by Phil Corbett. And Casey Emerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyder and Justin Hollis. Thanks to our guests, DJ Jazzy Jeff and Paul McCabe. You can find Jeff's latest work at DJJJJJJef.com. And a big thanks to One Plus for partnering with us on this episode.

To learn more, visit Oneplus.com. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.