FilterHN

Building a TB-303 from Scratch

57 points

by stagas

3 days ago

| past

| 7 comments

| loopmaster.xyz

| HN

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torusle

50 minutes ago

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The fun thing was the Roland Sync. You could sync up all the TB-303, TB-909 and all the others with a 5-pole DIN cable. The sync was badly implemented. It lagged, it had latency.

However!

As soon as you cabled all together their imperfections added up and they started to groove like nothing that has been heard before.

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rollulus

1 hour ago

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I think “simulate” would’ve been a more accurate word than “build”.

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tobr

19 minutes ago

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I also expected hardware to be involved. But in the context of a list of tutorials on how to use this live coding tool the title makes sense though.

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keyle

2 hours ago

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The TB-303 of reference to me is still Jeskola TB-303 :)

Back in my day of the demoscene and Buzz...

demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2kl-CW9snU

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lagniappe

1 hour ago

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Jeskola Buzz has a pretty interesting back story:

>The development of the core program, buzz.exe, was halted on October 5, 2000, when the developer lost the source code to the program. It was announced in June 2008 that development would begin again, eventually regaining much of the functionality.

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djmips

1 hour ago

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Sounds like a real bad day.

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skrebbel

43 minutes ago

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Yeah it was pretty spectacular. The author was a bit paranoid, had never shared his sources with anyone or backed them up anywhere or version controlled them to a remote SVN server or anything like that. And then his hard drive failed and Buzz development was over. IIRC there even was a community-organized crowdfunding campaign to fund some fancy data recovery company to try and revive the hard drive so he could get the sources back (not sure if this ever turned out happening).

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cocodill

28 minutes ago

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well by building 303, I would really expect building, something this guy do[1], not just simply using a filter in some shitty web app.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0/

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efdee

9 minutes ago

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The guy built the "shitty web app" (that's actually pretty cool, not shitty) from scratch.

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sambapa

18 minutes ago

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Shitty? Why so harsh? That web app IMO is great, like supercollider running in a browser.

At least it isn't some ai slop

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bandrami

1 hour ago

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It warms my heart to see the 303 getting a renaissance

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hnlmorg

32 minutes ago

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I don’t recall it ever falling out of fashion.

It’s easily the most used and copied sound. Like the Amen Break of synths.

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bowsamic

1 hour ago

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It’s a nice demonstration of this software but it really sounds very little like a 303

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stagas

46 minutes ago

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Try tweaking the accent multiplier to .1 from .5 - you can get there but it requires a lot of value tweaking. There's no singular TB-303 sound, but the components are there.

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kennyloginz

1 hour ago

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This is cool, but I would personally find an og iMac and install rebirth.

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1313ed01

12 minutes ago

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The Windows version (a legal, non-cracked, copy, even) runs well in QEMU. Pretty sure I managed to get it working in WINE as well at some point, but I prefer to have software running in QEMU as that tend to be much more install-and-forget rather than having to fiddle with settings or/and reinstall stuff every time there is an upgrade or I move to new hardware.