The Number That Moved the Snare Open any drum sequencer and you will find a dial labelled swing, usually a percentage. Most producers treat it as a feel knob. It is better understood as one of the most successful pieces of interface design in electronic music, because it reduces a drummer's lilt to a single […]
Cosmic disco was never really a genre. It was a club on Lake Garda, a DJ who played records at the wrong speed, and a cassette network that carried the room far beyond its 700 capacity.
In 1983 Roland set out to fix a machine that was not broken so much as misunderstood. The TR-808 had been dismissed as a toy, its synthetic booms judged unconvincing next to the sampled snares of the LinnDrum. So the TR-909 chased credibility: a crisper snare, six-bit sampled hi-hats and cymbals, and MIDI to lock […]
