Roland TB-303 Bass Line
A little silver box that was supposed to teach guitarists bass lines and instead taught the world how to make acid.
Overview
The TB-303 Bass Line was a small desktop unit built as a companion for the TR-606 Drumatix. Roland announced both at a combined list price of $395 each in a period dealer advertisement. The idea was simple on paper. A musician who wanted to practice bass lines, or who wanted a compact bass accompaniment to run alongside the Drumatix, could program a sequence and let the 303 do the walking. What Roland shipped was a bass synthesizer with a built-in pattern sequencer - a very specific, very opinionated machine that did one job and did it in a way nobody quite expected.
The early reception was lukewarm at best. A 1984 dealer clearance listing still had the TB303 Bassline on the shelf alongside a Jupiter-6 and a Juno-106, plainly unsold. Collectors love to tell it as a commercial flop that sat in the corner of music shops until a generation of producers figured out what to do with it.
They did figure it out. By the mid-1990s, the 303 had become the go-to instrument for acid house and techno bass, and the used market had noticed. Sound on Sound (August 1996, p.82) reported that acquiring all three of Roland's "original tools of cool" - the TB303 Bassline alongside the TR808 and TR909 Rhythm Composers - would set a buyer back roughly £2,000, and noted that finding them at all was the harder problem. The same magazine, a few months earlier (May 1995, p.193), carried a classified for a 303 described as a "much sought-after acid sequencer, in perfect condition with power supply, owners manual and service notes." Listing a service manual and notes as selling points says plenty about who was buying.
The 303's sound comes from its step sequencer and its filter. It is not a synth you play so much as a synth you program, and the accidents that happen when you push a pattern slightly wrong are the sound the instrument is famous for. Sound on Sound (June 1995, p.203) noted that more than a decade after its introduction, the TB303 Bassline was still surprising people. It was discontinued long before its reputation caught up with it.
The 303 also became a reference point for later gear. Propellerhead's ReBirth software, reviewed in EQ Magazine, was built around two virtual TB-303s with pattern sequencers plus emulated 808 and 909 drum machines. A $6.99 iPhone app in the 2000s was designed to imitate the same signal path.
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