Make the kick knock harder

[cartfisk]

The BD barely even slaps. ;) I assume there are some additional concerns here but if you could somehow channel a slightly more authentic kick/sub sound this thing would be out of this world. Great work, awesome project.

[vincentriemer]

I completely agree 😄

The design of the BD is based off of a SOS article talking about Kick synthesis and how you would recreate something like the 808s bass drum with a standard analog modular. Following this alone resulted in some fairly weak sounding kicks so I found a soft-clipping waveshaper curve to give it a little more umph. Unfortunately the waveshaper is rather sensitive and I really had to dial back the gain to make sure it didn't sound like a big-room distorted kick.

But back to the issue at hand. The TR-808 BassDrum was made using a Bridged-T Oscillator which was essentially a digital pulse trigger (actually the same signals used to trigger all of the other drum's envelope generators) being run through a specifically calibrated self-oscillating filter (here's a discussion on the topic).

As far as I know the BiquadFilterNode in the web-audio-api is not capable of self-oscillation so I'll need some help in what direction to go in.

[lacostenycoder]

I'll suggest an easier way to get the true 808 kick. Why not just use a high quality sample with the longest decay setting and use the decay knob to roll it off? I know that might not be the goal of this project, however, without the bomb 808 kick, you might as well not call it an 808 at all. In the hip hop world, "paducas" don't even know that an "808" is anything beside that famous low kick sound. LOL.

[vincentriemer]

I've been thinking about doing that for a while now. If I were to go down that route I think it would be best for the app to have two 'modes' (synthesis/sample). When the user would load the page, it would start in synth mode but then they could choose to switch to the sample mode which would trigger the downloading of the samples.

My biggest concern would be the legality of using the samples. Doing a quick google search there are various options for 'free' 808 sample packs but the majority of them do not detail a license for redistribution. On top of that a lot of these (free) sites seem (at first glance) not completely legitimate and it's hard to guarantee they aren't distributing someone else's work.

What we would need to find is a 'clean' 808 sample pack with an FOSS license in order to keep this project as FOSS as possible 😉

[lacostenycoder]

@vincentriemer The part about redistribution of sounds from an analog drum computer... here's an interesting thread on the topic. I'm no expert at copyright law, but I'm pretty sure that once the sounds are recorded through other hardware (i.e. DAW, CDR, DAT etc.) they are the copyright of the owner who sampled them. If they give away the license for free commercial use, I'm pretty sure you're in the clear. Since the sound was generated by the hardware originally through analog synthesis, the sounds are not originally a sample. The patents which Roland owns on the TR-808 is on the actual hardware design and not the sound it produces.

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=255116

Here's a pretty good source for samples. http://smd-records.com/tr808/?page_id=14 and are sounds that were used in this project which I forked and modified to add Swing and Instrument Mutes here! https://codepen.io/lacostenycoder/full/bgbQzX/

Unless you plan on selling these "samples" commercially, I don't think there's much to worry about in the way of legal issues. Consider the fact that your software version uses the same look, feel, color scheme, functionality and design as the original TR-808. I'm gonna guess you didn't get permission from Roland to utilize that much of their design concepts right? You could probably also add a disclaimer somewhere. When it comes to intellectual property, the further you drill into the topic, the more blurry it becomes.