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909 Kick Drum (wild)
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Listen to this kickdrum: |
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This is a field recording of a 909 kickdrum in its natural habitat: a scratched and pitted dub-plate cued an estimated 250 times.
The kickdrum itself is raw but bursting with vigour, the background noise akin to the dry grasses of the African plain. |
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Domesticated 909 Kick Drum
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Listen to this kickdrum: |
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One of the collection's most prized specimens, this is a pure-bred kickdrum from Soame's own TR-909 drum machine. Rounded and plummy, this kickdrum recalls the simplicity of early techno, but its timeless elegance ensures that it has matured rather than dated with age. |
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Distorted "gabber" 909 Kick Drum
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Listen to this kickdrum: |
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Soame suspected that this kickdrum, although harsher and more aggressive - "gabber" even - in tone, was in fact closely related to the 909 kick drum displayed above. He lacked many of the sonic analysis tools taken for granted by the modern scientist, but recent research has confirmed that his intuition was very likely correct: by superimposing the waveforms of the two kickdrums, we can see that they are to all intents and purposes identical apart from the square-wave distortion which affects the tonal quality and dynamics of the "gabber" variant:
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This result (reproduced courtesy of the authors, Habibi & Figgis, 1995) strongly suggests that Soame's gabber kick is a direct descendant of the untreated kick displayed in the same case; evidence is consistent with Soame's own theory that the gabber variant is a straight 909 kick boosted in volume by 18-20db. |
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