There’s an electronic device from 80’s called a “TB-303” or “303” for short. If you’ve never heard of it then you may want to watch a short and informative film discussing its impact on popular music over the last 20 years.
Within my lifetime the 303 has gone from expensive, to throwaway, to prohibitively expensive. Even though nowadays there are thousands of software implementations of the machine that sound, to my ears anyway, every bit as good as the original – the 303 is now for rich collectors only.
Years ago, just after the 303 renaissance that made them unobtainable to ordinary folk, and just before the explosion of digital emulators, I was looking around for some open-source 303 code, and I found this little C program. I read it, failed to understand any of it, and moved on. The emulators came, and I forgot all about it.
Tonight, as part of a new project involving playing with sounds, I rediscovered tb.c and had a play with it. Compiling it, running it, and pulling the output into Audacity begat this! Lars Hamre is my hero du jour. Amazing work.
[much time has passed since the last post – the frequency will increase forthwith]
