Ikutaro Kakehashi founded Roland Corporation in Osaka on April 18, 1972. He’d just resigned from his first company, Ace Electronic Industries, the previous month. Ace made electronic rhythm machines for electronic organs, and its largest customer was the Hammond Organ Company. When Roland opened for business, it had no products. Kakehashi quickly developed electronic drum or rhythm machines to start the revenue stream that would help him realize his bigger dream of delivering a broad range of electronic musical instruments to musicians around the world who longed for ways to make new and novel sounds. That first year, Roland introduced three rhythm machines: the TR-77, TR-33, and TR-55. However, rhythm machines were a means to an end for Roland, and the company introduced its first two keyboard music synthesizers, the preset SH-1000 and the SH-3 analog synthesizer, the following year.
From there, the company branched out and started producing a variety of electronic musical equipment including an electronic piano (1974), guitar amplifiers (1975), guitar effects pedals (1976), and a guitar synthesizer (1977). Roland did not forget about rhythm machines, however. The company recognized the power of the microprocessor, introduced just a few months before the company’s founding. It introduced the world’s first microprocessor-based rhythm machine to hit the retail market, the CompuRhythm CR-78, in 1978. (PAiA had introduced a mail-order Programmable Drum Set kit three years prior.) Unlike previous electronic rhythm machines that produced only a fixed set of rhythms, the CR-78 allowed musicians to create and store their own rhythm patterns in addition to the 34 preset rhythms built into the drum machine. You can hear the Roland CR-78 being used in songs such as “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” by Hall & Oates, and “Mad World” by Tears For Fears. Notably, the CR-78 used the analog circuits from the earlier TR-77, TR-33, and TR-55 rhythm boxes to produce the different instrument sounds, including the drums, cymbals, and other percussion instruments.
Although it was a successful product, the CR-78 was criticized for its inauthentic percussion sounds. The drums didn’t sound like actual drums. One music publication characterized the CR-78’s sound as “hissing chatter.” The lead engineer on the project was Tadao Kikumoto. He first considered using digitized recordings of actual drums and other percussion instruments for the new design but swiftly realized that semiconductor memory costs and capacities were not adequate. The selected approach was to use a microcontroller to trigger the various sounds and to use analog circuitry to generate the sound for each of the new rhythm box’s musical instruments: bass drum, snare drum, tom toms, conga drums, rim shot, cymbals, cow bell, claves, maracas, and hand clap.
Hiro Nakamura was assigned the task of developing new analog circuits to generate the percussion sounds for the new machine. Nakamura found a secret weapon to add sizzle, literally, to the new rhythm machine. It was an NPN silicon transistor, a Matsushita (National-Panasonic) 2SC828, used as a noisy Zener by reverse biasing the base-emitter junction. (The transistor’s collector was left unconnected.) The resulting Zener avalanche noise was used as a white noise source.
However, not just any 2SC828 would do. Some out-of-spec 2SC828s produced more noise than others, so Roland bought all the out-of-spec devices it could from Matsushita and then auditioned each device. Only transistors with the right noise, according to a listening test, were kept. On the schematic, this transistor is given a special designation: 2SC828RNZ. Presumably, the NZ suffix stands for “noise.” We do not know what audible criteria Roland used to select optimally noisy transistors; however, the resulting stash of transistors was sufficient to make 12,000 TR-808s, with one 2SC828RNZ NPN transistor used in each unit’s white noise generator.
The Roland design team selected the NEC μPD650C, a 4-bit microcontroller, to manage the rhythm box. (NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology merged to form Renesas Electronics in 2010.) NEC’s μPD650 was a CMOS implementation of NEC’s earlier μCOM-43, a PMOS single-chip microcontroller. This microcontroller family implemented an instruction set with 80 instructions. These NEC microcontrollers also incorporated 96 nybbles of RAM and a 2Kbyte, mask-programmed ROM for storing instructions and data constants. These microcontrollers were packaged in unusual 42-pin DIPS, which permitted the devices to have 35 I/O pins. In the TR-808’s design, the 35 I/O pins controlled the rhythm box’s user interface (buttons, switches, and LEDs) and triggered the dozen or so analog synthesis circuit blocks that generated the instrument’s various percussion sounds.
Roland’s TR-808 Rhythm Composer used a CMOS NEC μPD650 4-bit microcontroller to run the instrument’s user interface and to trigger the percussion sounds synthesized by analog circuit blocks in the unit. Image credit: NEC/Renesas
Roland released its new programmable rhythm box, the TR-808, in 1980, with a retail price of $1195. That same year, Roland loaned an instrument to the Japanese electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra, which first used the TR-808 in a live performance at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo and continued to use it for a while. Marvin Gaye used a TR-808 for his song “Sexual Healing,” in 1981. A TR-808 was used for a hip-hop collaboration by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force in 1982. That song, “Party Rock,” reached number 48 on the Billboard charts that year. Run DMC used a TR-808 for its song “It’s Tricky,” released in 1986. Whitney Houston used a TR-808 for her song “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” which she recorded for her second studio album in 1987.
Roland introduced the user-programmable TR-808 Rhythm Composer in 1980 with a retail price of $1195. It was on the market for two years and was not considered a commercial success. Roland made only 12,000 TR-808s. Today, thanks to its adoption by Hip Hop musicians, used TR-808s sell for as much as $10,000. Image credit: Roland Corp
Use of NEC’s μPD650C microcontroller in the TR-808 design made Roland an early embedded system developer. Although 4-bit microcontrollers were quickly superseded by 8-bit microcontrollers – like the Intel 8048 and 8051, the Motorola 6805/7/9/11, the Mostek/Fairchild 3870, the Zilog Z8, and the General Instrument (later Microchip) PIC in the US and Europe – they remained popular in Japan for many years because they were inexpensive and perfectly adequate for a variety of embedded applications including this new rhythm box and many other consumer applications.
Despite some acceptance, the TR-808 was not considered a commercial success during its production run. Various experts and publications compared the TR-808’s sound to non-drumlike such as the chirping of crickets or sounds made by “marching anteaters.” To put it kindly, the TR-808’s instrument sounds were judged as not being particularly realistic.
By 1982, Linn Electronics had introduced the $2998 LinnDrum, an instrument that employed digitized samples of real drums instead of synthesizing the percussion sounds using analog circuitry to simulate percussion instruments. In the two years between Roland’s introduction of the TR-808 and Linn’s introduction of the LinnDrum, semiconductor technology had advanced enough to obsolete the Roland TR-808’s technology. Roland discontinued the product in 1983, and previously-owned TR-808s started to appear for sale in music shops, with prices as low as $100.
That’s when the magic happened. Hip Hop artists seeking new sounds for their new art form discovered the unrealistic electronic sounds of the TR-808’s percussion ensemble, and they liked what they heard. They also liked the TR-808’s new low prices on the used market. Hip Hop musicians snapped up and integrated the TR-808 into their music specifically because of its sound, and because it was affordable.
Those low prices are gone now. Thanks to the TR-808’s revival and broad acceptance by Hip Hop musicians and by musicians from other new music genres, you’d best be prepared to pay as much as $10,000 for a used, 40-year-old instrument if you want to buy one today. If that’s too expensive, Roland has a deal for you. Given the TR-808’s revived popularity and the dirt-cheap price of semiconductor memory in the 21st century, you can get the TR-808’s sound from Roland’s new TR-08 Rhythm Composer, which sells for a few hundred dollars. Visually, the TR-08 looks like a close copy of the TR-808 with 1980’s graphics plus some updates to the controls. Inside the TR-08, you’ll find a fully digital instrument based on digitized samples of the original TR-808’s analog sounds. As always, technology marches on.
The next article in this series about the TR-808 will look at noise generation by adopting the TR-808’s approach to making white noise, using selected NPN transistors with reverse-biased base-emitter junctions to induce Zener avalanche shot noise.
For more information about Roland’s founder, Ikutaro Kakehashi, see “The Man Who Loved Music.”
References
“Four Decades, One Sound: Celebrating 40 years of the TR-808 Drum Machine,” Roland Corp
Hanif Abdurraqib, “The TR-808 Drum Machine Changed the Sound of Pop Music Forever,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2020.
“Roland TR-808 Service Notes,” June 15, 1981
“μCOM-43 Single Chip Microcomputer Users’ Manual,” NEC Computers, Inc, January, 1978
