In this lesson
Anatomy of a trap 808: pitch, tail and distortion
An 808 is a tuned bass note that hits like a drum. How to set its pitch, make it audible on a phone and keep it from fighting the kick.
Updated · 7 min read · Lesson 1 of 6 in Genre Guides
In short
- An 808 plays notes, so set the sampler's root note to the sample's real pitch and play it in the key of the beat.
- Distortion adds harmonics at whole-number multiples of the note, and on a phone those harmonics carry the bass line the speaker cannot play.
- Line up the kick and the 808 so their low ends push the same way, or duck the 808 for the length of the kick.
In this lesson (8)
The 808 that disappears on a phone
The beat sounds huge in the car. The 808 slides between notes, the floor shakes and the kick punches through. You send it to a friend, who plays it on a phone, and the bass line is gone: drums and hats over a hole. Back in the studio you notice something else. On the bars where the kick and the 808 hit together, the punch is thinner than on the bars where the kick plays alone.
Both problems come from what an 808 is: a low, almost pure tone that plays notes and hits like a drum.
Why it matters
The 808 is a bass instrument
The name comes from the Roland TR-808 drum machine, released in 1980. Its bass drum is an circuit that rings when triggered and dies away on its own; turn up the decay and it rings for a long time, going slightly flat as it does (Reid, 2002). Hip-hop producers tuned that long boom and played it as a bass line, and trap made it the main low-end sound. Today an 808 usually means a sample or synth patch built the same way: a tone close to a sine wave, a short click at the start and a long decaying tail.
So it has to be in the key of the beat, it has to be heard on small speakers that cannot play its , and it shares the lowest octave with the kick. Each of those is a separate job.
The science
Pitch, harmonics and polarity
Pitch first. A sampler plays a sample unchanged on its root note and shifts every other key from there. If a sample is really an F♯ and the sampler thinks it is a C, every note comes out six semitones off. The common rule that every 808 must be tuned to C is a convenience: it lets you leave the root note on C. What matters is that the root note matches the sample's real pitch. Find it with a tuner on the tail, after the click, because the attack often starts higher and drops.
The note decides where the energy sits. An 808 on F1 has its fundamental at 43.7 Hz, on A1 at 55 Hz and on C2 at 65.4 Hz. A phone speaker cannot move enough air to play 43.7 Hz, so a clean 808 nearly vanishes there. Distortion adds at whole-number multiples of the note:
On F1 they land at 87.3, 131, 174.6 and 218.3 Hz and up. A phone plays the upper ones, and the ear infers the low note from their even spacing, the missing fundamental (Moore, 2012).
Soft rounds the peaks and adds mostly lower harmonics. Hard flattens them and adds stronger high harmonics, which sounds brighter and more aggressive. A clipper that treats both halves of the wave the same adds only odd harmonics; asymmetric, tube-style saturation adds even ones as well. Compare at matched level, because the louder version tends to win at first.
Listen
Hear saturation add size, not volume
Bass and chords, or a real mix, through a waveshaper, level-matched so you hear the harmonics rather than a louder signal. Watch the spectrum fill in.
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Start with your speakers or headphones low.
last. The kick and the 808 share the same low range, so when they hit together, how their waves line up decides whether they add or partly cancel. If one pushes the speaker out while the other pulls it in, the low end of the hit thins out. It rarely goes silent, because the two sounds have different pitches and decays, but the punch you expected is gone. The lesson on phase and polarity shows the cancellation in detail.
Try it
Build an 808 and test it on a phone
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Common mistake
Filtering before the distortion
To keep the low end clean, you put the in front of the distortion. The harmonics are multiples of the note, so the distortion has to see the note. Filter first and there is almost nothing left to distort.
Another mistake is a fixed slot, such as boosting the kick at 60 Hz and cutting the 808 there. It stops working the moment the 808 plays a different note. Give each sound a job instead: a kick that is mostly click with a short low end leaves the sustained bass to the 808, and on some beats the 808 is the kick.
Hard clipping also creates harmonics above the that fold back as aliasing. Turn on the clipper's if it has one.
Takeaway
Tune it, distort it, line it up
Treat the 808 as a bass instrument that hits like a drum. Match the root note to the sample's real pitch, distort a copy so small speakers can hear the line, and check its polarity against the kick. Then program it with the drums: at 140 a beat lasts 428.6 ms, so a tail that rings for a second covers more than two beats. Sparse patterns can use it; busy ones need a shorter decay. Let the 808 share some hits with the kick and answer in the gaps.
Oscillator
The part of a synth that generates the raw waveform, such as a sine, saw or square.
Harmonics
Frequencies above a note's fundamental. In pitched sounds they sit at whole-number multiples of it, and their balance is a large part of timbre.
Saturation
Gentle distortion that adds harmonics and rounds off peaks, often modelled on tape, tubes or transformers.
Clipping
Cutting off the top of a waveform at a fixed level. Hard clipping flattens the peaks; soft clipping rounds them, which adds fewer harsh harmonics.
Polarity
Whether a waveform is upright or flipped. Flipping polarity inverts the wave at every frequency at once. It is not the same as a time delay.
High-pass filter
A filter that removes energy below a cutoff frequency and lets everything above it through.
Nyquist frequency
Half the sample rate. It is the highest frequency that sample rate can store correctly.
Oversampling
Running a process at a multiple of the session sample rate, then filtering and converting back. It gives distortion and clipping room to create high harmonics without folding them back as aliasing.
3 questions
Check yourself
Sources
Show all 2Hide sources
- Moore, B. C. J. (2012). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing (6th ed.). Emerald.
- Reid, G. (2002, February). Practical bass drum synthesis. Sound On Sound, Synth Secrets series.
Next lesson · 2 of 6
Phonk: a cowbell lead, a distorted 808 and grit you chooseWhere phonk comes from, how the 808 cowbell and distorted bass carry it, and how to make it loud and dirty without the mix turning into noise.
Written by Virzy Guns
Songwriter and producer, founder of Virzy Guns Production. Now building HealingWave.