They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, and this week's episode of What's That Sound is no exception: this time around, Noam and Jessica take a stab at recreating the ubiquitous and unmistakable sound of Roland's TR-808 drum machine using acoustic drums.
For this particular session, the 808 sound was achieved by combining the attacks of the kit with triggered white noise or sine waves. Of course, the drum machine could be found on several early hip-hop tracks—for this recreation, we used Run-DMC's 1986 single Peter Piper as the foundation, even working in the track's iconic sampled breakbeats and bells.
With those layers in mind, we started with a snare sound that was as tight and muted as possible. The 13" CB snare we found in a dumpster was in pretty rough shape, but once it was tuned all the way up, dampened with an upside-down drum head and lots of tape, and miked with an AKG C414, we arrived at the attack we were looking for. From there, Noam sidechained a noise gate to the snare and used that to trigger some white noise and a subtle sine wave—by adjusting the noise gate's envelope, we were able to recreate the 808 snare's white noise bursts.
We played with similar processing for the kick: after removing the front head of our Ludwig Vistalite and muffling it with a blanket, we took the attack—captured with a FET-47—and worked in a noise gate to trigger a 50hz sine wave.
On the other hand, the hi-hats needed to be extremely dampened: we tried clamping our 14" K Dark Zildjans down but quickly found that the only way to get those dampened enough was to have one of our engineers hold the cymbals, which were recorded with a Neumann U47. Much like the kick and snare, the hi-hats were sidechained to a noise gate that once again triggers white noise.
Once the foundation was tracked, we overdubbed Peter Piper's additional rhythmic elements. Throughout the chorus sections, there appears to be a sampled breakbeat underneath the 808 sounds—for this, we used our 414 to record the breakbeat and layered that in with some simple compression and EQ. We then recreated the agogo-style bells with two glasses of water struck with steel knives, also tracked with the 414.
How close did we get to the signature sound of the 808? Watch the full video above and find out.
Learn more about how your favorite artists created their signature sounds in our ongoing What's That Sound? series.