Anything goes

Acid history

Lucian | Saturday, April 19, 2008

I was writing about Higher States of Consciousness , and it was this very song that made me investigate the history of acid house. I want to post here some of what I have found, although I imagine that anyone who wants to know all this stuff already knows it and the people who don’t know it wouldn’t want to read about it anyway. But hey, I gotta blog about something, right?

Basically, everything revolves around a small piece of electronic equipment called the Roland TB303. This was a synthesizer created by Roland in 1982 with the intention of marketing it as a replacement of the bass guitar to members of the rock and punk scene. Here is a picture of it (source):

But it never caught on. For one thing, it was hard to use, difficult to program and didn’t even sound like a bass guitar. So Roland built about 10.000 units and then stopped. All these pieces that were manufactured ended up forgotten in some basement or attic.

Occasionally, they were used, however, although I was only able to find references to one song that used the TB303 for its intended purpose. It was a band called Heaven 17, with their song Let Me Go (year as yet unknown - early ’80s however). Here it is:

You can distinctively tell the bass line in this song is made by some weird, repetitive machine and it evidently sounds nothing like the bass guitar, but does have a catchy feeling even here.

From early on, there were those who foresaw the potential that the tool had in making dance music. Probably the main feature that made it fit for this task was the fact that the TB303 is programmed like a sequencer. So once you put the pattern in, set the BPM and place the knobs how you want them, it will repeat that pattern over and over, so it was perfect for the 4×4 patterns we hear nowadays all over the dance scene. An early pioneer from this point of view was Alexander Robotnik, with his song Problemes d’Amour. Here it is:

I hear this was quite a hit worldwide in 1983! And I think it’s not hard to understand why: the song is quite catchy even now, don’t you think? Again, we can distinctively tell the bassline is made by the TB303.

But the real breakthrough came in 1987, rather by accident. That year, a group from Chicago called Phuture started playing in their studio with the knobs on a TB303 they had and noticed that the squelching sounds it made were very catchy. So, whereas previously these sounds were considered flaws of the TB303, the guys from Phuture had the intuition to notice that they provided the basis for a new sound. From their experiments with the knobs came out what is considered the first acid house track: Acid Trax. Youtube helps here too:

(Psychedelic, isn’t it?)

We can already see in there the basics for acid house, minimal, techno, trance and other subgenres in between. I don’t mean to say here that all these genres originated in this song, because most of them were starting to take shape before acid house. But it is considered to have had the single most important influence on the future development of almost all electronic music. Acid is considered to have changed them forever, both in terms of content and in terms of perception. Another thing was that, because the TB303 was so small and easy to experiment with, pretty much anyone could use it to make music, so it created a boom in the output of electronic music of all kinds. What followed is history.

So how is it used? Here is a guy demoing it all on Youtube (together with the TR606 drum machine, which was especially built to be used with the 303 this way):

So you can see how easy it is.

And the TB303? Well, with only 10.000 pieces around and everyone wanting to use it, its price rose to some 1000 euros in the mid ’90s and is probably even more now. Roland refused to bring it into production again, contributing even more to the high price. They eventually released some replacements, but they just didn’t have the same sound and feel. Of course, emulators and software replacements started showing up from everywhere, with various levels of success. A relatively new project claims to have recreated the original version of the 303 and sells kits which everyone can build at home. The kit costs something like 300 dollars.

So there we have it! History of acid. More details can be found in various sources: