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The TR-808 Cymbal: a Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model

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The TR-808 Cymbal: a Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model The TR-808 Cymbal: a Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model Werner, K. J., Abel, J., & Smith, J. (2014). The TR-808 Cymbal: a Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model. In A. Georgaki, & G. Kouroupetroglou (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th International Computer Music Conference and the 11th Sound and Music Computing Conference (pp. 1453–1460). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/tr-808-cymbal-a-physically-informed-circuit-bendable- digital.pdf?c=icmc;idno=bbp2372.2014.221 Published in: Proceedings of the 40th International Computer Music Conference and the 11th Sound and Music Computing Conference Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © 2014 The Author(s). This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and source are cited. General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:04. Oct. 2021 Proceedings ICMC|SMC|2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece The TR-808 Cymbal: a Physically-Informed, Circuit-Bendable, Digital Model Kurt James Werner, Jonathan S. Abel, Julius O. Smith Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) Stanford University, Stanford, California [kwerner j abel j jos]@ccrma.stanford.edu ABSTRACT in music journalism, but this has distracted from focused study of the individual voice circuits. The 808’s cymbal We present an analysis of the cymbal voice circuit from a voice circuit represents a significant leap forward in the classic analog drum machine, the Roland TR-808 Rhythm design of analog drum machine voices—it is a complex, Composer. A digital model based on this analysis (im- efficient circuit that reasonably approximates a real cym- plemented in Cycling 74’s Gen˜) retains the salient fea- bal sound. tures of the original. Developing physical models of the The 808 cymbal has only a few user-controllable param- device’s many sub-circuits allows for accurate emulation eters: decay, tone, and level. To access the latent potential of circuit-bent modifications (including component substi- of the circuit, drum machine modders add additional tun- tution, changes to the device’s architecture, and voltage ing and architecture-level controls, even going so far as to starve)—complicated behavior that is impossible to cap- allow external audio to be routed through the circuit [6]. ture through black-box modeling or structured sampling. This tradition parallels the development of circuit-bending This analysis will support circuit-based musicological in- and other music hardware hacking, and could potentially quiry into the history of analog drum machines and the de- be lost in the process of digitally emulating an 808. sign of further mods. By adopting a physically-informed approach, and favor- ing an analysis that elucidates the design intent, this work 1. INTRODUCTION supports informed mods of the circuit. A more compli- cated analysis could obscure the logic of the device’s con- Despite significant work that has been done on cloning and struction, with minimal gains in accuracy. Framing the emulating the TR-808, there is an almost complete lack of analysis in terms of component values simplifies the sim- published analyses on the circuit. 1 We have begun to fill ulation of mods based on component substitution. 3 Parti- this void with [3], which develops a physically-informed, tioning the circuit into blocks allows for the simulation of circuit-bendable, digital model of the TR-808’s bass drum mods based on changes to the circuit’s architecture. 4 voice circuit. In the following paper, we will use related We give an overview of the circuit in x2 and an anal- techniques (well-represented in virtual analog literature) to ysis of each part of the circuit and their interconnections analyze the 808’s cymbal voice circuit. in xx3–11. This is followed by a discussion of modeling The goals of this research are to partition the 808’s cym- techniques in x12 and results in x13. bal circuit into functional blocks, create a physically-in- formed analysis of each block, model each block in soft- ware, and evaluate the results. Throughout, we will pay 2. OVERVIEW special attention to developing an analysis in terms of the electrical values of circuit elements. Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of the TR-808 cymbal It is particularly important to analyze the 808 in this way, circuit. This annotated schematic labels important nodes because of the extant misinformation surrounding the de- and currents, and shows how the circuit is broken down vice. 2 The 808’s rich mythology has been well-covered into blocks: Schmitt trigger oscillators (see x3), band pass filters (see x4), trigger logic (see x5), an attack smoother 1 previous work includes [2], which offers a qualitative discussion (see x6), envelope generators (see x7), “swing-type voltage- of [1] in the context of imitating classic synthesized cymbal voices with modular synthesizers controlled amplifiers” (VCAs, see x8), high pass filters 2 For instance: the user manual for the Novation Drum Station (an (see x9), a tone control stage (see x10), and an output buffer early rack-mount TR-808/TR-909 emulator) says the cymbal sound is generated by “multiple noise sources,” which is patently false. Some and level control (see x11). Fig. 2 shows a block diagram improbable stories about the machine’s design turn out to be true. Don of the digital model of the cymbal circuit. Both figures Lewis, an early pioneer of drum machine modification, worked on the design of the 808 and even developed techniques that influenced its voice design [4]. He relates a story from his visit to Roland’s Tokyo offices in on inside–he sort of bumped up against the breadboard and spilled some the late 70s, where he worked with chief engineer Tadao Kikumoto. “That tea in there and all of a sudden he turned it on and got this pssh sound–it day he had a bread board of an 808 and was showing me what was going took them months to figure out how to reproduce it, but that ended up be- ing the crash cymbal in the 808. There was nothing else like it. Nobody could touch it.” [5] 3 Copyright: c 2014 K. J. Werner et al. This is an open-access article distributed for instance: adding tuning controls to the oscillators, band pass fil- ters, and high pass filters; additional controls to the static envelope gener- under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which ators; or extending the tone controls. 4 permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided for instance: allowing each of the 6 rectangular wave oscillators or the bands to be individually muted, bypassing filters, or injecting external the original author and source are credited. audio. - 1453 - Proceedings ICMC|SMC|2014 14-20 September 2014, Athens, Greece Figure 1. TR-808 cymbal schematic (adapted from [1]). should be consulted alongside the analysis of each block This primarily had the effect of a producing a tunable cow- in the following sections. bell voice. However, they also form an important part of To produce a cymbal note, the µPD650C−085 CPU ap- the cymbal sound as well. 7 plies a common trigger and (logic high) instrument data The inverter has only low and high output states (VOL to the trigger logic. The resulting 1-ms long pulse is de- and VOH ), and transitions between them are subject to hys- livered to the envelope generators via an attack smoother. teresis. When an input voltage VI rises above a positive- The output of this smoother drives four envelope signals, going threshold voltage VT + , the output swings to VOL. which are applied to three swing-type VCAs, where they When VI falls below a negative-going threshold voltage 8 control the amplitude of three bands of filtered rectangu- VT − , the output swings to VOH . lar wave clusters. Two different active band pass filters Since the positive-going and negative-going threshold sum and filter the output of six Schmitt trigger inverter os- voltages for a Schmitt trigger input are different, the circuit cillators, producing these clusters. The output of each of will oscillate back and forth as the capacitor is alternatively the three swing-type VCAs is applied to a corresponding charged and discharged. Considering the continuous-time Sallen-Key high pass filter. From there, each band is ap- cases of a charging and discharging capacitor separately plied to a tone control stage and a level control, which sums yields the capacitor charge and discharge times: the three bands back together and buffers the output. VOH − VT − tcharge = RC · ln (1) 3. SCHMITT TRIGGER OSCILLATORS VOH − VT + VOL − VT + The TR-808’s Cowbell, Cymbal, Open Hihat, and Closed tdischarge = RC · ln : (2) V − V − Hihat voice circuits all work by filtering and enveloping OL T rectangular waves.
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