AND HOW TO RECREATE THEM IN YOUR DAW
Sometimes music production can be too clean, perfect and within the rules. Here are six techniques where we went extreme, dirty or just plain wrong, and it turned out to be, well, right!
1 MISUSE OF THE 303
The Roland TB-303 could be the most famous mis-used instrument. Originally designed as a bass guitar accompaniment, the 1981 synth was disappointingly not particularly good for its intended purpose, so most of the 10,000 units ended up selling cheaply.
One was picked up by Phuture, a trio of producers in Chicago comprising Earl ‘Spanky’ Smith Jr., DJ Pierre, and Herbert ‘Herb’ Jackson. “We were all about basslines,” said DJ Pierre. “Spanky was looking around second-hand stores and said ‘I’ve got the 303 but I don’t know how to work it, it’s making these crazy sounds!’ We just started twisting knobs and playing, got caught up in these new sounds and forgot about trying to produce a bassline. It sounded good and that’s really how it happened.”
The ‘it’ was the start of acid house. Their debut record Acid Tracks lit up Chicago and the sound spread around the world. The original 303 rocketed in value but you can emulate a 303 sound – up to a point – with any analogue VA softsynth. See our tutorial for more.
2 THE S950 TEST TONE
Not so much a mistake, more a ‘best use of resources at hand’, the Akai sampler test tone was adopted by early jungle producers in the ’90s as the prime source for their half time basslines to hold up those much faster breaks.
There are arguments over which was the best sampler to get the best tone from, or even whether an 808 kick could do the trick (as it did in hip-hop sub bass), but the general consensus is that it’s the pure sine wave that counts and that there was something about the S950’s 12-bit architecture and DACs that made it an especially great candidate.
Either way if you want to recreate it, it’s all about a sine wave, pitching it down an octave or two, its envelope (intricate positioning of the attack and release) and compression. There are also plenty of sites where you can download the S950 test tone as a sample. You won’t get the hardware character but it’s a good foundation.
3 FLANGING
This sweeping frequency effect is thought to have been invented by The Beatles and George Martin during the recording of the album Revolver. Engineer Ken Townsend was experimenting with Artificial Double Tracking of the vocals to avoid recording John Lennon singing twice, which Lennon hated doing. Ken set up two tape recorders and delayed one, resulting in a p
