All About That Bass

Vintage music barely had any bass. Today’s hits are all about the low end. What changed?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:07Roman Mars?

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• 1:41Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:48Roman Mars?

  In the 15 years we've been making this show, a lot of podcasts have reached out saying that we in some way inspired their approach to storytelling. But to me, the podcast that consistently embodies the spirit of 99PI while still infusing their episodes with a thoughtfulness and care that makes everything completely their own. is 20,000 hertz. Imagine 99% invisible, but every beautifully crafted story is about sound. Every once in a while, I hear an episode of 20,000 hertz, and it's such a definitive statement on a subject that I think, I just have to share this. And that's what I have for you today. This is the story of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Before they were all over popular music, drum machines had a humble origin.

• 2:31Roman Mars?

  They were originally built into home organs with chintzy sounds that plunked along to preset rhythms like the cha-cha and the foxtrot and the waltz. But the earth-shaking 808 changed everything, and its seismic waves spread out far beyond music that had an electronic backing beat. It introduced an addictive low-end rumble, and pop music was never the same.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Tell me, have you ever heard this melody?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  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...

• 5:18Speaker 01

  to disco hits like Le Freak.

• 5:28Speaker 01

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

• 5:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:04Speaker 01

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

• 6:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  The Roland TR-808 is a drum machine.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  As you can imagine, people wanted a rhythmic instrument that wasn't as big or loud as a live drum kit.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  For years, drum machines were used casually, and professional musicians mostly ignored them.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:21Speaker 01

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

• 9:29Speaker 01

  This is "The Robots" by Kraftwerk.

• 9:32Speaker 04

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

• 9:39Speaker 01

  For Kraftwerk, drum machines were a perfect complement to their precise synthesized basslines.

• 9:48Speaker 01

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

• 9:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  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."

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And here's the CR78 in Phil Collins's "In the Air Tonight."

• 10:34Speaker 01

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

• 10:43Speaker 01

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

• 10:48Speaker 04

  When one sees a TR808, it almost looks military in its design. It's kind of a drab olive color, and there's a reason why TR808s 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.

• 11:11Speaker 01

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

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Electric guitars defined rock and roll.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And the 808 transformed hip-hop and electronic music.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  It's this otherworldly mashup of this kind of east coast New York sound with Kraftwerk.

• 11:58Speaker 01

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

• 12:05Speaker 03

  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 hi-hats, like an 808. So it was definitely sought after so that you could kind of make these records.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Once these DJs got their hands on the 808, they started expanding on its possibilities.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  There was a record funk box party by Mastodon Committee, and he was a DJ that was very, very good on an 808.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Musicians were experimenting. Here's Egyptian Lover over on the west coast.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And here's some 808 electro funk from a group called The SOS Band.

• 13:11Speaker 01

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

• 13:26Speaker 01

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

• 13:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  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.

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• 16:17Roman Mars?

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• 17:02Roman Mars?

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• 18:02Roman Mars?

  We're back with more 808 from 20,000 Hertz on 99% Invisible. That's all the numbers I've got for you.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Even when we got to the TR808, the technology was designed to recreate an acoustic drum kit.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:48Speaker 04

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

• 18:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  I ended up getting mine from a pawn shop, because you couldn't really walk into a store and see an 808.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:59Speaker 01

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

• 21:08Speaker 04

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

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Here's the kick. Snare. Closed hi-hat. Open hi-hat.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Crash cymbal. Toms. Hand clap. Rimshot. Cowbell. You always gotta have more cowbell.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And finally, clave.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  When you started 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.

• 21:48Speaker 01

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

• 21:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Here's Scorpio by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. You can hear that the kick drum is relatively low in the mix.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Someone had the heart to put an 808 kick drum that it was round and it was boomy and it felt really good.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Here's Planet Patrol with a rounder, louder kick drum.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Then somebody on a record opened up the decay.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And when that kick drum rang out, it was nothing like you've ever heard.

• 22:50Speaker 01

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

• 22:55Speaker 05

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• 23:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Here's La Trim, a Miami-based hip-hop duo singing about boomy car stereos in 1988. Notice the signature sustained 808 bass drum sound.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  Cause when you're in the streets, you can't go far without hearing the boom pouring out your car.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  20 years later, Felix de Housecat released the song Kick Drum, which pushes that decay to its absolute limit.

• 23:52Speaker 01

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

• 24:03Speaker 01

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

• 24:16Speaker 01

  It's in DNA by Kendrick Lamar.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  It's in Up by Cardi B.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  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 in 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.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:26Speaker 03

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

• 25:41Speaker 03

  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 it, and the entire car would vibrate. And I was like, I want that.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  But since that was so unusual at the time, the engineer refused.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  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. Hip-hop is something that the drums have to drive the record. And I got him to allow me to do that. 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.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  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 and mastered.

• 27:13Speaker 01

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

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And here's what DJ Jazzy Jeff was probably going for.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  So as hip-hop grew, the sound of hip-hop grew, the backbone of that sound was the 808.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Pretty soon, these boomy bass drums spread into R&B, electronic music, and beyond.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  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 in making it or playing it that affects people's moods. That's the coolest job in the world.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  20,000 Hertz is produced out of the Sound Design Studios of De Facto Sound. Find out more at defactosound.com.

• 30:11Speaker 07

  This episode was written and produced by Phil Corbett.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  And Casey Emmerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyer.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  And Justin Hollis. Thanks to our guests, DJ Jazzy Jeff and Paul McCabe. You can find Jeff's latest work at djjazzyjeff.com. And a big thanks to OnePlus for partnering with us on this episode. To learn more, visit oneplus.com. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

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