If you listen to vintage music, one of the first things you’ll notice is the complete lack of bass. But turn on a Top 40 station today, and you’ll hear song after song with deep, sub-ratting bass tones. So how and why did this change happen? For this episode, we worked with OnePlus to tell the story of our collective obsession with bass, and the one device that transformed the sound of popular music. Featuring hip hop legend DJ Jazzy Jeff and Roland's Paul McCabe.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Summer of Love by Roy Edwin Williams
Laika's Last Lap by pär
What We Didn’t Do by Particle House
Bless the Ride by Witchitaw Slim
Gecko Suitcase by Frook
Sudden by Timothy Infinite
Backboard (with Chris Mazuera) by jakuzzi jefferson
My Time Right Now by James Myles Jr.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[music in: Al Jolson - That Haunting Melody]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand 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.

Twenty 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.

[music clip: Louis Armstrong - When Your Lover Has Gone]

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.

[music clip: Bill Haley - Rock Around the Clock]

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.

[music clip: The Rolling Stones - Route 66]

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.

[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Summer of Love]

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 Dazed and Confused…

[music clip: Led Zeppelin - Dazed and Confused]

To disco hits like Le Freak…

[music clip: Chic - Le Freak]

But as bassy as that is, it’s nowhere near the booming, sub-rattling tones we hear today.

[Post Malone - Congratulations]

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.

[SFX: Cybertron 808 Beat]

The 808 is everywhere. You may or may not know it by name, but you’ve definitely heard it before.

[Music clip: Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance with Somebody]

[Music clip: Beastie Boys - Brass Monkey]

[Music clip: Usher - Yeah!]

[Music clip: Beyonce - Drunk in Love]

[Music clip: Lil Nas X - Old Town Road]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.

[Music clip: The Magnificent Jazzy Jeff]

DJ 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 an 808.

[music out]

Paul McCabe: 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 twenty or thirty years, they had mostly been used in the home.

[living room music in: par - Laika’s Last Lap]

Paul McCabe: 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.

[music out + applause]

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 [SFX: Guitar strums], maybe a piano… [SFX: Quick Piano riff] or an organ... [SFX: Organ riff]. As you can imagine, people wanted a rhythmic instrument that wasn’t as big or loud as a live drum kit.

[SFX: drum fill]

Paul McCabe: 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.

[SFX: Roland TR-66 Rhythm Arranger]

Paul McCabe: So, particularly the earliest drum machines were 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.

[drum machine out]

But in time, musicians did start to find uses for drum machines. By the early 70s, many songwriters would program a drum beat 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 drum machine was Family Affair, by Sly and the Family Stone.

[Music clip: Sly & The Family Stone - Family Affair]

Around the same time, early versions of electronic music were starting to go mainstream.

[Music Clip: Kraftwerk - The Robots HQ Audio]

This is “The Robots” by Kraftwerk.

Paul McCabe: Kraftwerk is a four piece band out of Dusseldorf, Germany. They would be one of the founding fathers of techno.

For Kraftwerk, drum machines were a perfect compliment to their precise, synthesized bass lines.

[Kraftwerk up, then out]

By the late 70s, drum machines were finally gaining traction.

Paul McCabe: 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 CR-78, which was a predecessor to the 808.

Here it is in Blondie's Heart of Glass.

[Music Clip: Blondie - Heart of Glass]

And here’s the CR-78 in Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight.

[Music Clip: Phil Collins - In the Air Tonight]

These songs inspired early demand for a stage-ready drum machine. So Roland got to work on a new model.

[SFX: 808 beat]

They wanted to build a machine that was portable, flexible, and durable.

Paul McCabe: When one sees a TR-808, it almost looks military in its design. It's kind of a drab olive color, and there's a reason why TR-808s are still being used today because you could drive a truck over them

[SFX: truck hit]

And probably many of them would still work. That was what was in our mind at the time. Where it went to, needless to say, is someplace quite different.

[808 out]

Over the centuries, there have been a few instruments that changed music forever. The piano revolutionized classical music...

[music clip: Beethoven - Für Elise]

Electric guitars defined rock and roll…

[music clip: Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode]

And the 808 transformed hip and hop and electronic music.

Paul McCabe: 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 Afrika Bambaataa and Planet Rock.

[Music in: Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force - Planet Rock]

Paul McCabe: It's this otherworldly mashup of this kind of East Coast New York sound with Kraftwerk.

[music out]

Like a lot of musicians at the time, DJ Jazzy Jeff heard Planet Rock and was captivated by the drum sounds.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: We emulated whatever we heard, so you know, when Planet Rock came out, it was kind of like, "I need that machine."

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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 crispness to the hi-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.

[music clip: The Masterdon Committee - 1982 - Funk Box Party, Part 1]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: There was a record, Funk Box Party by Masterdon 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.

[Music clip: The Egyptian Lover - Egypt, Egypt]

And here’s some 808 electro-funk from a group called The S.O.S. Band.

[Music clip: S.O.S. Band- Just Be Good To Me]

Here’s Indian musician Charanjit Singh using an 808 on his album Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.

[Music clip: Charanjit Singh - 8 Ragas to a Disco Beat]

And here’s Marvin Gaye’s more minimalist use of the 808.

[Music clip: Marvin Gaye - Sexual Healing]

[music transition into: Particle House - What We Didn’t Do]

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.

Paul McCabe: There was all these moments that were happening, these musical moments that were very serendipitous in the early '80s that, ya know, if they'd gone 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.

[music transition into Witchitaw Slim - Bless the Ride]

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.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[808 beat in]

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.

Paul McCabe: Even when we got to the TR-808, the technology was designed to recreate an acoustic drum kit.

[music up, then out]

The 808 was released in 1980, and at first, it wasn’t a big hit. For one thing, it cost twelve hundred dollars, which is about four thousand six hundred in today’s money. And soon after it came out, the 808 got some tough competition.

Paul McCabe: Right about that same time, 1981, the first drum machine that used recorded sound clips or samples came into being.

[SFX: Sample based drums in]

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.

[morphs to 808 beat]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.”

[808 beat out]

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.

[music in: Frook - Gecko Suitcase]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.

Paul McCabe: 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 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.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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 [SFX: Snare samples with snappiness being removed], and you can add more boom into the kick [SFX: Kick samples with boom increasing].

DJ Jazzy Jeff: This one machine could sound a hundred different ways.

[music out]

The 808 may have sounded artificial. But those video gamey tones were highly adjustable. And that ended up being the key to its success.

Paul McCabe: And so with that in mind, you look and you've got these 11 sounds...

Here’s the Kick

[SFX]

Snare

[SFX]

Closed Hi Hat

[SFX]

Open Hi Hat

[SFX]

Paul McCabe: Crash cymbal

[SFX]

Paul McCabe: Toms

[SFX]

Paul McCabe: Hand clap

[SFX]

Paul McCabe: Rimshot

[SFX]

Paul McCabe: Cowbell [SFX], you always got to have more cowbell.

[SFX]

And finally clave

[SFX]

[808 beat with clave & cowbell]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: When you start getting into the clave and the cowbell, those were two very distinctive sounds that if you put them on anything, you knew they came from an 808.

[808 beat out]

But there was one sound on the 808 that changed music forever: the bass drum, also known as the kick.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.

[Music clip: Scorpio - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five]

Here’s Scorpio, by Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. You can hear that the kick drum is relatively low in the mix.

[Grand Master Flash out]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.

[Music clip: Planet Patrol - Play At Your Own Risk]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: Then somebody on a record opened up the decay, [sfx] and when that kick drum rang out, it was nothing like that that you've ever heard.

Here’s DJ Jazzy Jeff himself opening up that decay, and letting the kick drum drive the song.

[Music clip: DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince - Just One of Those Days]

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 subwoofers was largely because of that tone.

[Music in: L’trimm - Cars That Go Boom]

Here’s L’trimm, a Miami Bass hip hop duo, singing about boomy car stereos in 1988. Notice the signature, sustained 808 bass drum sound.

[Music up, then out]

Twenty years later, Felix da Housecat released the song “Kick Drum,” which pushes that decay to its absolute limit.

[Music clip: Felix da housecat - Kickdrum]

Today, artists often shift the pitch of these 808 kick sounds to create full on bass lines.

[808 bassline]

Over the last couple decades, this technique has been used in hit song after hit song. It’s in Hotline Bling, by Drake…

[clip: Drake - Hotline Bling Instrumental]

It’s in DNA by Kendrick Lamar…

[clip: Kendrick Lamar - DNA Instrumental]

It’s in Up, by Cardi B…

[clip: Cardi B - Up Instrumental]

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.

[808 beat in]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: You're not supposed to have your bass drum driving that much, and it's kinda 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.

[808 beat out]

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.

[Music in: Parents Just Don’t Understand]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: When we did He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, was the first record that I used 808s and 808 samples on, that I wanted the kick drum to really resonate.

[music up, then out]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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 was some hip hop records that you would get in a car and you would play it, 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.

[music in: Timothy Infinite - Sudden]

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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 need it 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."

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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 [sfx: filter sweep] sucked all of the bottom end from the 808 out in mastering.

[filterted music out]

Here’s a clip from He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper as it is on the record.

[music clip: He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper]

And here’s what Jazzy Jeff was probably going for.

[music clip: He’s The DJ, I’m The Rapper - bassy]

[music in: jakuzzi jefferson - Backboard]

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.

Paul McCabe: 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.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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.

Paul McCabe: Today, the 808 is just 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 has 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.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: This is why I love music so much, because there's a thousand different combinations and ways to get to a result.

DJ Jazzy Jeff: 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, in making it or playing it, that affects people's moods. That's the coolest job in the world.

[music out into music in James Myles Jr. - My Time Right Now]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.

Other voices: This episode was produced by Fil Corbitt, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter and Justin Hollis.

Thanks to our guests, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and Paul McCabe. You can find Jeff’s latest work at DJ Jazzy Jeff dot com. And a big thanks to OnePlus for partnering with us on this episode. To learn more, visit OnePlus dot com.

I’m Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

[music out]